Legwarmers

Sandwich Girl said she wanted legwarmers. Her old ones were falling apart. I said, "Sure, I can knit legwarmers." She brought her old, much-used pair of legwarmers over & I measured. She had a couple requests: a skull and cross bones and the brightest colors I could manage.

My target size:
Total length: 20.5"
Top ribbing: 3.25"
Bottom ribbing: 2"
Main body: 16"

With J&S wool & #3 needles, my stitch gauge is 8 stitches and my row gauge is 10 rows. Given those numbers, I started charting in Excel.

Someone decided the requested skull & cross bones should actually be a sandwich & crossbones. This person was kind enough to also chart the design so all I had to do was plug it into Excel. I found a charted Old English alphabet online & plugged that into my Excel chart to write 'Sandwich' around each leg'.

Yes, I use Excel to chart fair isle patterns. It works. Really.
I learned a lot about what NOT to do with color on this project. Sandwich said she wanted 'bright' so I picked 'bright', not always in the best combinations. I also learned that contrast matters much more than I would have thought.

Another learned tibit: the final legwarmers ended up being kinda small. I realized later that my initial measurements had been taken from an old worn machine-knit single-color pair of legwarmers. My hand knit legwarmers, with stranded color along the wrong side, would not stretch as much as the original single-thickness pair. Well, blocking fixed part of it. I put some large wooden dowels in the legwarmers & set them out in the living room to dry.
Before blocking Being blocked

2003.02