A Knitter’s Blog

What a frustrating week I had. I decided that the next Interactive Tool that we should offer was a sleeve body calculator. We have named it Sleeve Body Wizard.

Building the tool was far more complex than I had first thought. I took all of your emails and questions regarding shaping the body of a sleeve into consideration.

First and foremost, you wanted the shaping done on RS (right side) rows. You also wanted the spacing that would produce a nearly perfect diagonal line on either side. And, finally, you all wanted stitch counts at the end of each shaping row.

When I made my list of your requests, it didn’t sound too complicated. However, I couldn’t believe what the code began to look like. I am not going bore you with “geek talk” and discuss with you my nested conditionals, nested in yet more conditionals. But I need to say that after one nesting session, I began to wonder, “Is this tool even worth the effort?”.

I just finished and published the Interactive Sleeve Body Wizard. and I am thrilled at the result. It is just so neat. 

I love the fact that we can now offer you a sleeve shaping map. Each shaping row with its final stitch count provides a foolproof guide.

This is the perfect tool to use with commercial patterns when you want to change the sleeve length. I am short and sleeves are always too long. Rather than trying to reproduce the sleeve in Sweater Wizard, which means that I have to fool around until I get all the numbers matching for both the cuff and the widest part of the sleeve, I can enter the wrist stitches, the widest part of the sleeve stitches and my preferred length.

Then, I am just Click Calculate away from having a sleeve that will fit me and will also fit into the armhole of the pattern.

I love computers!

Filed under: Knitting, Software by cwulster