G. Knerd

It’s really not a good idea to calculate how many stitches are in a project you’re doing.  Especially if it’s a large project.

My friend Erica is getting married in less than three weeks.  The Wedding Blanket II is for her (and her lovely fiance, of course), and…

…well, let’s just say that I’m likely going to follow tradition and present her with this blanket at some point after the wedding.  Unless, of course, I manage to find 50 or so hours just lying around in that time.

How did I come up with 50 hours?  Well, it’s all a bunch of math, and revealing all of my calculations would also reveal more than I want to about the pattern, so we’ll start with how many stitches are in one block in the blanket: 12,464 sts/block.

Then we multiply that by 16 because there are that many blocks in the blanket: 199,424 sts/blanket.

Then we acknowledge that I’m only this far:

That’s 10 blocks done, or 6 more to go, depending on how much you want to lie to yourself today.

Then we assume that I can knit at an average rate of about 0.5 sts/sec – it seems slow, but that includes things like casting on or picking up, and seems to be borne out by my experience on this blanket, so that’s 149,569 sec, or 2,492 min, or 41.5 hours.  Even assuming zero time for blocking and seaming (and we all know that’s really not true), that only gives me 8.5 hours to figure out the border for this thing.

Now, technically, it’s possible for me to finish the blanket in time.  I’d just have to skip work for a week or so, do nothing but eatsleepbreathe the blanket, and I could get it done.  On the other hand, I think Erica and her husband-to-be would rather that I stay sane, happy, and employed, even if it means their present might be a bit late.

A couple days ago, the Blanket Thief looked at me in a panic and asked, “Did we get [the bride and groom] a wedding present yet?”  He couldn’t understand why my only answer was to stare at him in disbelief.