You know how people talk about left brain vs right brain people? That’s never really worked for me.
See, I have a bunch of both. My left brain leads me to make up math problems that I worked on when I finished standardized tests early, and do logic puzzles, and feel awkward when writing creatively. My right brain drives me to play made up games with my best friend that lasted an entire school year, be on stage singing and dancing, and connect to people in an empathetic way.
The awesome thing about knitting for me is that it blends both the traditional left and right sides of the brain. Yes, it is a creative, crafty pursuit. I get to play with color and get inspired by beautiful stitches. But there is also so much math. I love a nice colorwork repeat or an evenly spaced crown decrease on a hat. It’s really the perfect blend between the fun and creative and the logical and mathematical. And recently, I’ve really enjoyed developing that part of knitting even more.
For example, about a year ago I read a blog about how you determine the weight of the yarn if you are holding two yarns together. It inspired me to create this Excel tool, which was a super fun hour and a half of my life. I really enjoyed solving that problem and coming up with a solution that worked for everyone.
About a year ago, I expanded my love of data and knitting to creating Excel spreadsheets to track my sweater knitting. I create a table with each row and the number of stitches per row, and then mark what date I complete each row. I then can use a few Excel formulas, some handy pivot tables, and I have nice pretty charts to keep track of how much I knit. It’s super fun for me and I love having the data to know how much I knit. I published the file for my Zweig, and while I’ve made a few changes since, the basic format can be found here. The images below are from when I knit the Soldotna Crop, which was a great knit.
What do you think? Does the idea of tracking your knitting in Excel excite or terrify you?