The White Oak leaf pleased me.
The maple leaf (I’m not sure if it’s original was Norway or Sugar, you are supposed to be able to tell by the length of the lower fingers, but mine had crumbled it was pressed in my notebook so long, and anyway, the knitted version went with a proportion that was easy to stitch, not necessarily accurate to the original.)
I liked the two leaves together, they had looked good as leaves, and since they were scaled the same, they looked good together as stitches.
But the cherry was called for as something to help me with grading. I didn’t have a leaf that had worked with real leaves, I had a drawing in Sibley’s Guide to Trees. It worked with itself, but not with the other two leaves.
I pulled out my ruler, and did a proportionality. The White Oak and Maple widths were nearly a golden proportion of each other. The cherry was slightly too small. Next proportion, how big would it be if it WERE in proportions? How many more stitches to get it to that approximate size? (I didn’t calculate this, I slid my ruler over with one thumb on the size it should be, the other on the size it was, and looked at the swatch for how many stitches were sitting within my thumbs. There were one and a half, but since odd numbers of stitches are much easier to center, I added 2 to the first cherry leaf chart.)
Next step: tweak the stitch chart and make the sample.
Drum roll please – did I like the swatches together?
Oh phew, I do.
Let’s see if I can get this sweater graded, written, tech edited, photographed and up on Ravelry by next Fall, I also need a small maple (or other palmate leaf) to sit next to the large maple leaves, so the warping of the short rowed fabric is cancelled out. I’m (over) confident that I’ll get there – each leaf has taken 14 iterations so far, except the cherry, which only needed 9. So, in 14 chart/swatch/evaluate cycles, I should have a Cutleaf or Japanese Maple leaf (whichever one turns out to be pretty and easy-ish to stitch) to make the Norway/Sugar maple leaf play nice.