Getting Even
When I was starting out as a knitter, the only phrase I hated to see more on a pattern than "sew seam" was "pick up evenly." Decreasing evenly or increasing evenly was hard enough. My goodness, is it really that hard to write out how many stitches are needed in-between the buttonholes?
For starters, picking up evenly is explained exceptionally well in Lana Holden's chapter in "Making Mathematics with Needlework." She also just happens to be the guest in this week's interview.
Buttonholes and Edges
The real issue with picking up evenly is knowing what to do when you have a few too many or a few too few stitches. Lana gives some good advice later that you should pay attention to if this has plagued you, too. The only truly intelligent thing I can say about it is that you can scribble and scratch all you like, but you won't really know how a picked-up fabric will behave until you try it. You may choose to try it on your sweater that you worked on for three months, or you can use a gauge swatch. I vote for the gauge swatch. It has saved me many tears and tear-outs.
You can use your swatch to test this rather directly. There are usually more rows per inch than stitches, so this step is important. Let's say that 27 rows and 21 stitches makes a perfect square in your knitting. If you picked up one stitch for every row, you would have 6 too many stitches, and your edge would flare out. Let's pretend that you are careful (or wary) enough to mark off every 27 rows along your edge. Twenty-seven divided by 6 is 4.5. So, you can (mentally) divide 27 rows into six groups - 4 rows, then 5, then 4, then 5, then 4, then 5. If you skip one row in each of these groups, it will come out evenly. So, you would (pick up 3 stitches, skip 1 row, pick up 4 stitches, skip one row) until you have picked up 21 stitches in 27 rows. Also, remember that, if you have slipped every first stitch in your piece, the chain edge on your work might actually represent two rows, instead of one. Be sure to take that into account. I've worked around this in the past by working into both the left and right sides of the face of the chain stitch.
In short, you take the number of stitches you know you will have left over, divide the largest number you are using by those leftover stitches, and arrive at how many groups you need to manage to remove, reduce, or otherwise skip those extra stitches.
Buttonholes are a slightly more thorny problem, although only because symmetry matters. Let's say you have 56 stitches in your picked-up button band, and you want 5 buttonholes along the band. Each buttonhole takes 2 stitches to make. So, you need (5 x 2 = 10) stitches to use for the actual holes. Subtract 10 from 56 to get 46. Forty-six divided by 5 (the number of buttonholes) is 8, with 6 left over.
Now we have to think about space a little bit. The top of your band will have a certain number of stitches, then a buttonhole, then stitches, and another buttonhole, etc. For this example, if you spread out your five fingers, and count the spaces around and between your fingers, you will see that there are 6 spaces. There is always one more space than there are fingers. So, there is also always one more section to be knit on a button band than there are buttons. Those six extra stitches can fit in, one for each space, along the band. Take the first group of 8 and divide it by 2 to get the base number of stitches in the bottom and top sections of your band. Then, add 1.
Final Answer: The band could be 5 stitches, one buttonhole, 9 stitches, one buttonhole...until you knit the last 5 stitches. Checking the math: (5 + 2 + 9 + 2 + 9 + 2 + 9 + 2 + 9 + 2 +5 = 56. I do like to always write things out in this way, to check my math, but also to clarify what I'm planning.
If the ratio of stitches before the first buttonhole and the second bothers you, now that you have it all divided and written out, you can see that you could also work it as 7 + 2 + 8 + 2 + 8 + 2 + 8 + 2 + 8 + 2 + 7. (If you don't see it, you could still just write it out, as a test, and check the math in the end.) You could have figured that out in the first place if you noticed that 46 is just 2 short of being evenly divisible by 6, which is the number of spaces we are thinking about anyway. Forty-eight divided by 6 is 8, which is the number of stitches between the buttonholes. The two stitches short then just come out of the top and the bottom of the band.
It just shows that there are many ways to get to good answers, and all of them are right.
This is when I worry that a coworker can hear me talking to myself, the way I always did in math class, while working arithmetic. Oh well. It's worth it if the numbers behave.
I must confess that I'm still not crazy about sewing seams. I haven't found a way to divide or subtract myself out of that particular problem. Please let me know if you do.
Crafty Giveaway
My colleague, Joyce McCartney, is going to be offering a free, handmade bracelet on our blog, www.journalgazette.net/craftyliving. Log in after noon on Monday, March 8, 2010 for details about how to win it.
Interview with A Knitter
Lana Holden is a contributing author of the book "Making Mathematics with Needlework," and the designer of a sock named Skew, which was recently published as a surprise in Knitty. She is also charming. I hope you enjoy hearing us as much as I enjoyed speaking with her.
Links
Knitty Page for Skew
Making Mathematics with Needlework
Nancy Bush's Traveler Stockings are in Knitting on the Road
Lana Holden's blog is called The Knitting Laboratory
Lana Holden's LYS is River Wools
Swatch Use Count
Nine - this one is using the edge of your swatch to test how many stitches you should pick up to get a well-behaved edge.
