So there I was, finishing off the last couple dozen of motifs for the ogee blanket, and I decided to join a few motifs just to double-check measurements and confirm they were going to fit together. As one does.
And that's when I noticed that I had made some very wrong assumptions in calculating the number of motifs I'd need.
The first assumption was easy to mitigate. It turned out a vertical row of 11 motifs was closer to the measurement I wanted than the planned 12, especially if you included the border I was going to add. Okay, more arrangement options, less to join, what's not to love?
The second assumption, that's what. I'd figured an original blanket size of 12 motifs long by 12 motifs wide. And I'm not wrong, except that I treated the motifs as a square grid, not as what they are — a tessellation.
Look at that red-edged motif in the photo up top. See how it reaches the halfway point of the row to the left of it? Now imagine there were motifs to the right of it, where the table is. It, and the entire vertical row it belongs to, would span from halfway inside the row to the left to halfway inside the row to the right, adding virtually no width to the overall piece. The point of each ogee adds about a centimetre, not the 13 centimetres I'd planned.
That means I need nearly twice as many vertical rows as I thought to reach the actual width I wanted, which works out to... 12 more horizontal half-motifs and 94 whole motifs.
That's the bad news. The good news is I still have lots of yarn left over, even taking seam yarn and border yarn into account. It's just going to take a few weeks longer is all, and I'll have to be careful when placing motifs which are made from colours in short supply so they don't get clustered together.
Yeah. That's it. Really.
Sigh.