Mittens, Meatball Geometry

MITTENS

I take back what I said about "Latvian Mittens" being overpriced. It's a fairly skinny book, but the color plates are worth it. There are over eighty mittens pictured (with black and white graphs for the motifs), and it is fascinating to see pattern and technique relationships with mittens from the Scandinavian and Baltic countries. One motif is the same as a design described as Swedish in an old Nomis booklet. Another (not surprisingly) can be found in Nancy Bush's Estonian collection. Several are almost exact matches to charts for Norwegian mitten patterns in Sheila McGregor, and I am sure another is a match to one from Gotland. (Now I want to haul out all those books and start close comparisons.) Fascinating, and beautiful. Not to mention impressive in the fine yarn/tight gauge used, and the fearless use of more than two colors per row. (I can knit with one color in each hand, but haven't mastered adding in a third.)

MEATBALL GEOMETRY

I've used up one ball of yarn on the shawl center, and so far it measures about 13" from the lower point to the top edge. How large can I make the entire shawl?



Fuzzy photo. I have a lovely scan, but can't get it to upload.

I used this little graph to do a rough calculation (wish I could remember what book I found the concept in). If one ball of yarn gets me one triangle's worth, 9 balls of yarn will get me a piece three times as long from bottom point to upper edge (red dotted line), which would be about 39". Sounds OK.

Of course, the garter center section won't be that big. In fact, what I have right now is almost large enough to fit the border as planned. I just figure the border and edging patterns won't eat up any more yarn per square inch than garter does.