Sunday, April 04, 2010

Mad Math Skillz


Marnie MacLean has posted an enormously detailed tutorial on her blog about how to use MS Excel to assist with resizing patterns.

I laughed at first.

And then I stopped.

It's no secret that I have a degree in mathematics. And I spent 15 years working in IT.

And clearly I've been taking it all for granted.

My educational and professional background means that this stuff is so damn obvious to me. I mean, of course you create cells with the stitch and row gauges, and then you input the sizes and have the stitch numbers calculated using a formula.

It's how I do all my sizing. In fact, a spreadsheet is how I do all my designing tasks - planning, sizing, charting, taking notes as I work. I could give up word processing, but never spreadsheets.

(I used to be an an exclusive user of Microsoft Office, but have been slowing moving over to Open Office of late. It's a free, open-source Office software pack, and it's really very good.)

It's good to be reminded sometimes that you can't assume that everyone else knows what you know.

On that note, I'm not going to recreate the wheel. Go read Marnie's post.

3 comments:

Natural fibre girl said...

Wow... thanks for the referral site. It's pretty detailed, but that's Ok because I like math too.. I tell my classes " it's all about the math" they laugh..

V said...

Absolutely, 100% agree, hands down. Math is integral to design success and making good mods. Period.

Unless you just want to knit a scarf from a giant skein of bulky yarn or only want to make dishcloths for the rest of your days, in which case, rock on.

kat said...

Just curious, what math degree did you get and what did you do in IT? You should do a long post about how you got from that to being a full-time(?) knitter.