Math Helps!

Sadly, one of my favorite yarn shops decided to close. The owners were moving away and didn't sell the business in time, so Handworks in Smicksburg, PA is gone. I found this out during a chance visit during their liquidation. Let's say it was a bitter-sweet day. One of my LYS closed, but all items were 50% off. I made a dent in my wallet.

A friend of mine was up visiting from Florida and saw some yarn she fell in love with (Zitron Unikat 100% wool rainbow). There were two hanks left and she bought them. We decided I would make a triangle shawl out of the yarn. Now that we're down one ball, I'm realizing how the concept of exponential growth works. By adding two stitches to each right side row, I KNOW it's going to take more and more yarn to do each row. To decide whether to move forward or to frog and make a scarf instead, I had to recall some high school math.

Knowing that one ball of yarn gave me a triangle with a base of 31 inches and a height of 22.5 inches, we were able to determine the area to be 348.75 square inches (to refresh your math memory, the area of a triangle is equal to one half the base times the height. Thank goodness I have a colleague who is a high school math teacher because the next part got tricky. You see, there's the issue of the trapezoid shape the second ball of yarn would create. We knew the area of the trapezoid would be the same area as the original triangle, and knew that one side of the trapezoid would measure 31 inches. What I didn't know was that even though I was an A+ trigonometry student in high school... I have no idea how to use the sine and cosine functions anymore (I felt a little old).

Long story short? He figured out the final measurements of the shawl would probably be a "base" of 48.58 inches with a height of 28.71 inches. I sent these measurements on to my friend, and she's confident this will be appropriate measurements for her. And if it's not, she can send work back and I'll frog it and knit up a scarf. So, now I'm back to knitting and wondering if I should buy a basic trig book to catch up... I guess that depends on whether my math teacher friend decides to help me in the future, and how many triangle-shaped pieces I decide to knit up!

By the way, the pattern is improvised, and I plan to post it when the work is done.