So I’m merrily knitting the edging of the Pi Shawl and after I’ve knitted twenty or so repeats (or “points”), I decide to work out how many I’ll have to knit. I made it 72, so reason I can easily finish the whole edging in a week.

Today I decided to count how many points I’d done, as it looked like I’d gone well past 60 but still had quite a few stitches left. So I counted. 84. I scratched my head for a bit. And then it dawned on me.

There are 576 stitches.
There are 8 rows to the border pattern.
576 divided by 8 equals 72.

However…

For each 8 rows, I only use 4 stitches from the shawl. So I need to knit 144 repeats.

ARRRGGHH!

I was worried that I wouldn’t have enough pins for pinning out each of the 72 points of the shawl while it was blocking. I definitely don’t have enough for 144. In fact, I don’t even want to think about pinning out 144 separate points and how long THAT is going to take.

I’m up to 100 points now. If you need me, I’ll be the gibbering wreck in the corner, muttering “k2tog, yo, k3, yo, ssk…” to myself.