Math - we hateses it

So once upon a time, when this WoolMonkey was in high school, she loved math so much she wanted to teach it. Then she taught remedial algebra to a bunch of high school kids and it took all of 40 minutes for that dream to die. Yet she still loved math (albeit was confused as to why others didn't) and she went on to major in both math and something useful (not to say math isn't useful, but there aren't many options outside of teaching or research for theoretical math majors). And she did well, learned about chaos theory and fractals and used her computer science major (the useful one) to animate the fractals to make pretty pictures. She was proud.

And she happily went through life, proud that she needed a calculator to balance her checkbook (not an accountant, theoretical math, no numbers). And then she began knitting. First she knit socks and scarves and hats and the math was easy..different gauge? simple algebra. Need to reduce some stitches in a pattern or the number or the number of repeats? Simple as pi. And then she made a sweater...from the bottom up. and she happily trucked along, following the loosely written pattern until she got to the yoke, where the pattern said 'Decrease evenly over all stitches'. And she looked, and thought, and looked again, and panicked a little and then found a handy decrease calculator and finished her sweater.

Then she decided to start a cardigan. Now this cardigan (Tangled Yoke from Interweave Knits Fall 07) needed a great deal of alterations, as it called for a gauge of 6st/inch and the yarn she was using yielded 4.5st/inch. So she set out modifying the pattern for her gauge...and all was well. The body was knit, the sleeves were knit, the sleeves were attached to the body. And then the decrease round appeared. And she had calculated wrong from the pattern. So she consulted her knitting guru, the Genypher (ravelry link), and her knitting guru came up with a suitable decrease row. And so away she knit. And she discovered that she should probably not be watching the tellie and trying to count at the same time as she had decreased too much. So back she ripped. She sat, stumped, looking at graph paper, wondering how math failed her and the light bulb came on and away she knit again...and decreased too much. And again there was ripping.

The cardigan is currently sitting in a ball on the couch sulking, where I will need to move it when the couch cleaners come today. I'll be working on socks instead.