Math and Mattress Stitch

After I published the post Madison Wisconsin USA January-December 2023 about the unfinished temperature blanket I was making as a wedding present for my younger daughter and her new husband, I was still troubled by the fact that I had been unable to think of the algebraic equation for calculating the number of rows I would need to get a square shape from a stitch count of 84. I needed a number that would enable me to pick up stitches modularly at a 3:4 ratio to get the 84 stitches from which I would knit a new square. I used a much cruder method to get my number, 112, but I felt really ashamed of my innumeracy, and I lay awake the night after publishing the post trying to do the mental math to divide 112 into 84 with the hope that the result would point me toward the equation I was looking for. I’m not that good at mental math. In the morning, the first thing I did was to poke the numbers into my calculator: .75, my 3:4 ratio!

Now that I knew the numbers for all three parts of my equation, I could move around my X from one side of the equal sign to the other, until I arrived at the embarrassingly basic equation I needed to calculate row counts at a given ratio, knowing my stitch count: 84 ÷ .75 = 112. I’m pretty comfortable with multiplying numbers by .75 to get a smaller number, but for some reason I had a lot of trouble accepting the idea that to get a larger number, I would need to do the inverse operation, division. But now I have the equation in my pocket for deriving row count from stitch count at a 3:4 ratio. It’s n ÷ .75 = x. I will never forget it. If only I had been taught math through knitting when I was a school child, which might have opened up the whole world of math-based career possibilities. I might have been a good civil engineer. Maybe I could have survived med school to become a pathologist (doctor daughter doubts it)…. determining cause of death sounds like something I would have enjoyed and done well… But no real regrets. I went into the liberal arts and learned the now-rare arts of coherent writing and critical thinking. Not to mention that it prepared me for a career in which I used my field of study for a 30+-year career that gave me the life I wanted and a comfortable retirement.

Now that I was done with the machine knitting, I could let my back heal from the stress I had put it through by working at the machine for 3-5 hours daily on my inadequate chair. Now I could mattress-stitch for miles while binge-watching The West Wing in a soothing rocking chair. But as I stitched my way through President Bartlet’s first two years in office, I began to suspect that I had outsmarted myself by recalculating the measurements for the seasonal panels on the basis of the gauge of the stranded patterning and subtracting the number of stitches in the squares that were used up in the modular joins. I couldn’t sew them to the edge of the temperature side evenly. I hoped that I could get everything to lie flat and fit together perfectly by steaming the blanket on my ironing board after it was all assembled, but the finished blanket was so huge, heavy, and unwieldy (weighing in at 9.67 lbs) that I could barely even get it onto the ironing board, which could only accommodate a small sliver of it at a time. The steaming effort was a bust. I did tack the corners of the temperature blocks to the inside of the seams of the seasonal panels, to try to keep the blanket from shifting and twisting unrecognizably out of shape, but that’s a pretty rough version of flatness and doesn’t meet my standards of perfection. I grieve.

I grieve because the lumpiness and messiness disturbs the part of the project that I probably get the most satisfaction from, the photos. It drives me mad that my in-progress pictures look better than the finished-object pictures.

I really love the seasonal panels, but they look a lot better viewed close-up in detail rather than from a distance includes all four panels in the picture. The montage picture I fabricated from four separated photos of the panels gets the idea across better than photos of the assembled panels.

I took a couple of pictures with a corner folded over to try to show both sides of the blanket. They don’t look like much.

Oddly, the photo of the finished blanket that I think looks the best is the picture I snapped of it folded up with the edges showing, in the bag we used to haul the monster up to the UPS store up the street.