Crochet math? 2 questions

[Sonny321]

One of my biggest challenges when coming up with new designs or patterns to crochet is figuring out the math involved in getting the right number of decreases over the proper number of rows. There has to be a better way than how I've been doing it. Basicly I take several sheets of graph paper and graph out at scale how the sleeve will look and then re-adjust several times to get it to look right, and even then there is a lot of frogging. Sleeves are my nemisis. I am mathmaticly challenged.:huh If I had some sort of standard formula though to figure it would help. Anyone have any clue if such a formula for figuring increases and decreases in sleeves exists?

Now the second question, Has any one ever used the software from knitware? I read that it's supposed to be useful for designing crochet patterns as well knitted ones. I have just downloaded the demo this morning and was playing around with it, it's pretty interesting so far. You have to imput each crochet stitch you plan to use. Which lead me to my next question. While trying to imput the info for how to make a simple single crochet, the program asks the question, " this stitch is a multiple of___ plus ___stitches", I'm not 100% sure but I think that the correct answer is 1 and 1, Your thoughts?

[rebeccav]

i know there is a sweater tutorial out there somewhere.... i need to ck my files..... i'll be back

:thumbsup



i'm sorry, i only have a sec... but that tutorial is on here.... .somewhere:huh

so sorry i don't have the time to find it.... hope you can!
how to "sweater" (http://www.io.com/~cortese/crafts/index.html)

okay, it wasn't as hard to find as i thought:

link (http://www.io.com/~cortese/crafts/raglan.html)

[enmac]

Hmm. What I did was measure how wide I wanted the sleeve to be at the top, and how wide it was at the bottom, and worked out the difference. Then I worked out how many stitches that was (by comparing against the front and back of the sweater that I had already crocheted), and divided by two to get the number of times I needed to increase on each side. I measured how long the sleeve was going to be, and worked out how many rows that was, and divided that number by the number of increases required to get the number of rows to work between increases. Then I fudged the results a bit (adding or subtracting rows at the start and end) to make it work out OK.

Maybe that's not any easier that what you did. :thinking1