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Stoichiometry

Stoichiometry is the part of chemistry that involves calculating the numerical relationships between various things in a reaction.  When I was studying chemistry, it was always my favorite part, because it felt a little bit like alchemy – if you could find a chain of relationships between any two things, you could convert that thing into the other.  For example, although you can’t convert apples into shoes, both apples and shoes have a relationship with money, and so you could convert apples into money and then money into shoes.

I may be a bit of a nerd, actually.  If that’s a surprise to you, you might want to double check what the name of this blog is…

Anyway, I finished the swatch for the Wedding Blanket II, and I got Erica and her husband-to-be to pick out yarn colors, which meant that I was all ready to buy some yarn…as soon as I figured out how much I needed to buy.

So (avert your eyes if math makes you woozy)…

I started with 0.75 skeins of Cascade 220 and created a 10″ x 16″ swatch, or 160 square inches:

160 in² = 0.75 skeins Cascade 220

1 skein Cascade 220 = 213.3333 in²

I want to make a blanket that’s about 5′ x 6′, or 60″ x 72″, or 4,320 in² (NOTE: if you want to keep your sanity, never calculate how many square inches or number of stitches are in your current project.  That way lies madness.):

4,320 in²/(213.333 in²/skein) = 20.25 skeins Cascade 220

To account for the margin of error on my original weight measurement, the fickleness of the swatch, the whimsy of the Knitting Gods, and the fact that I’m using two colors, I decided to order 30.  I’d produce some kind of snappy remark about how there’s no way I’m going to run out of yarn now, but I’m smarter than that.  I’ll just posit that, based on my calculations, it would appear that I’ve probably procured enough yarn to be able to finish this blanket.

While at WEBS, I may have also procured some yarn for myself…but the Blanket Thief was sitting right next to me when I did it, and he totally nodded his head when I asked him if it was okay.  He might have been playing video games at the time, and it’s possible he wasn’t actually nodding so much as focusing on the TV, but that totally wouldn’t stand up in a court of law…