Maybe I'm a nerd in disguise

Or maybe I'm fooling myself and I'm not wearing a disguise at all! ; )

Here's my mitten chart! If you followed the saga on my blog over the past week or so, you know that I chose a chart (Graph 75, Plate 11f in Latvian Mittens), swatched three times last weekend, and struck out all three times. Alas, the pattern was for much smaller yarn and needles than I want to use. I paged through the book again and wrote down a list of charts that I liked and were more in my gauge range.

Tonight, I sat down with my photocopies and the book and noticed that one of the charts -- Graph 124, Plate 15f -- was almost just like the favored 75, but with a number of stitches more suitable to my gauge! I wanted a different cuff, though, and my row gauge is way different... I thought of photocopying, cutting, pasting, scribbling and coloring on graph paper, but I really prefer to do that kind of "doodle" on the computer these days.

I opened my spreadsheet program, did a little division and a lot of jiggling to figure the aspect ratio so that the grid was as close as I could get to the dimension needed for a) knitter's graph paper and b) my exact (within reason) row and stitch count. I already had a couple of knitter's fonts downloaded -- which I really didn't need since I'm only using three colors -- and I began to chart. The cuff design is based on 75, but the hand is 124 -- except that my row gauge is something like 14 stitches to the inch, so there are three repeats instead of two. Perhaps I'm wrong about that, but I don't think so... and I can adjust along the way if needed. I need to double-check the length and figure the new placement of the thumb, but I'm close!!!