Um... wow

Border is on the life line.
I actually took it off the needles b/c I wanted to check my gauge and make sure it was actually true to the swatches.

It is. It's large.



(Please ignore the fact that there is a door in the blounge. In fact, ignore the word blounge as well.)




Here it is in a kind of circle on its nice purple lifeline.





I lightly steam blocked the whole thing and I'm a little bit afraid of it. This is a picture of it growing as I block.

It's very, very big.
To clarify, it's exactly the size that I planned, because this section has to border the whole sweep of the train - which I planned to be 60". And it is. The whole thing measured at about 13 and 2/3 feet - I was aiming for 13 feet. So I was aiming for large. I just wasn't fully prepared to be smacked in the face by the largeness of it. I might in fact be on the way to a tiny little freak out, so I'll concentrate on the details.

I'm okay with the fact that it's 13 and 2/3 feet, which is 2/3 of a foot larger than I'd planned. The lace looks better blocked taller, but I didn't realize that until about a third of the way through - I think I could make that extra 8" or so go away if I had to. And even though gauge is very important, yadda yadda yadda, it's a full skirt. That splits up the front. And extra 2/3 of a foot isn't going to kill anyone.

So now I'm left with figuring out exactly how to do the short rows to make the train curve as I want it to. I actually did geometry this evening for the first time in more than 15 or so years. I'm now going to publish that geometry on the Internet and hopefully not embarrass myself or Sr. Mary Dee, the nun who taught me geometry (and calculus - but the least said of that the better). The idea that Sr. Mary Dee might see my blog and recognize incorrectly done geometry is actually scarier to me than the idea of the ridicule of the general public. After all, I have a theater degree. No one expects great things from me mathematically. Except for Sr. Mary Dee. And she was one scary nun. Once she scared the hiccups right out of me. I'm not kidding - it can be done.

Anyway, the 60" sweep of the train would be half the circumference of the circle, if I was making a circle. Circumference = pi * diameter. Diameter is what I'm looking for, so I'll know the width I want the train to be when I finish the short rows. 60 * 2 = 120 or the full circumference of my imaginary train circle. Divide both sides by pi and I get a diameter of 38.2". Divide that in half to get the radius of this imaginary circle, which is the height of the short row section and I get 14.1. Of course I never bothered to write down the gauge of my size 10/short row swatch b/c I was only really concerned with the gauge of the size 13 swatch (to get the bottom measurement of the skirt) and the size 8 swatch (to get the top measurement of the skirt). I have to go dig out my swatch from my wedding keepsake box and measure. There are all my little swatches. Don't they look cute?Fortunately the height is between 7-8" for one repeat, depending on where I measure it (the difference is due to the scalloped edge). So I can work the lace chart two full times and will get about 14.1 inches, or the desired height of the internal section of my train. And that means I'll have a 2-3' train with the border, which is a nice length I think. The width of one repeat is about 5-6" (again, difference is caused by the scalloped edge), which is a little more of a problem, since the train section has the pattern repeated 9 times and that would give me 45-54", not 38". I'm not really sure how to deal with that.

And that's really all the math I can handle. I know that I can figure out a way around that 7-16" difference. I know that I can now calculate exactly where to turn my first short row. I feel that that knowledge is about 15-20 minutes of hard thought away from me. Okay, maybe closer to 20-30 minutes of hard thought.

I also feel that I've drunk half a vodka and soda and I've already worked equations that involve pi for god's sake.

I bought a nice bridal magazine yesterday. I think I'm going to go read that for awhile.

Sometimes, you have to quit when you're ahead.