Sometimes I read a comment in a Ravelry discussion and it takes a while to click in my head. Marnie MacLean mentioned a few weeks ago that she re-writes the numbers in her schematic to reflect her stitch counts after finishing her design. That should have set off joyful sirens in my head, instead my head said, “Huh?”
So last week I was playing on a spreadsheet for a new pattern, and I sighed. “Oh if only I had all even numbers between the darts in all 10 sizes.” Then I wondered what would happen if I fudged that part of the spread sheet so I did have all even numbers. I quickly set up another row of cells to tell me what the finished measurements would be with my fudged numbers, and I fudged some more numbers so the sizes would be close to what I was aiming at for sizes. Quick definition here: nice numbers are ones that are even numbers if you want your instructions to start at the same edge for all sizes, or ones of the same multiple as your stitch pattern if you want to be able to repeat a pattern only once in a series of instructions, not once, one and a half, one and three quarters… Nice Numbers also give you finished sizes within a quarter of an inch of what you were aiming at.
So that’s how you write a multi-sized pattern without needing twenty pages of text to fit all the instructions in.
That Marnie, she’s a genius.