Ruana #2: Wiedikon

Status: Work in progress.

Overview

The ruana is knit in the round in stockinette stitch downwards from the neck. This makes it easy to control the size of the Ruana – you simply switch to adding borders once you reach the desired size.

The main differences with Ruana #1: Ráquira are:

• Octagonal ruana. Ruanas are typically squared, with the neck slit parallel to the sides. When arms are raised sideways, away from your body, the lower part of a squared ruana hangs parallel to the ground. However, as the arms are relaxes, even if only partially, the lower part of the ruana bunches in a shape similar to the letter “w”. By choosing an octagonal shape, the Wiedikon ruana essentially trims off that waste.

• Linen stitch. The Wiedikon ruana uses linen stitch, making it significantly thicker. Most parts use single-color linen stitch, but

The shape is an irregular octagon:

The triangles have these angles:

• Arms: 20°
• Front and back: 40°
• Sides: 60°

Instructions

Knit a swatch

Knit a large enough swatch to know the length of your rows and stitches. You’ll need this ratio in order to configure the sections of your ruana.

Neck

Assuming 0.5 cm per stitch (slightly stretched) and a target neck circumference of 40 cm would call for 80 stitches.

We’ll cast 88 so that once we’re done with the neck, we can divide them thus (formula is constant * stitches * occurences):

• Separators: 16 (2 * 8)
• Front and back: 16 (2 * 4 * 2)
• Sides: 48 (2 * 6 * 4)
• Arms: 8 (2 * 2 * 2)

A round starts in the separator between S4 and the left arm. In the last round, place markers:

• PM, K2 (separator), K4 (left arm)
• PM, K2 (separator), K12 (side S1)
• PM, K2 (separator), K8 (front)
• PM, K2 (separator), K12 (side S2)
• PM, K2 (separator), K4 (right arm)
• PM, K2 (separator), K12 (side S3)
• PM, K2 (separator), K8 (front)
• PM, K2 (separator), K12 (side S4)

Body

Configure my kniting software based on the aformenetioned angles. I configure it with 500 rows simply to make things simple; I don’t expect anyone to actually knit so many rows.

You’ll have to compute the width (stitches) that each section would have if you knitted 500 rows based on the angles and your stitch and row lengths.

Arms width

The arms have an angle of 20 degrees. The sides of the triangle (connected to the other sections of the octagon) measure 500 rows * length_per_row. To compute the corresponding length of the outer part of the arm section, we multiply that by 0.35 (from 2 * math.sin((20 / 2) * 2 * math.pi / 360)) and divide that by length_per_stitch.

(For simplicity, we deliberately ignore that the arm starts already with 4 stitches.)

For example, if you have 0.4 cm per row and 0.3 cm per stitch, after 500 rows the ruana would have a radius of 2 m and the outer part of the arms section would measure 70 cm, or 233 stitches.

Other sections’ width

To compute the stitches in the outer parts of the other sections (front, back, S1 … S4), just multiply the stitches of the arms:

• Front, back: Multiply by 2 (466 stitches in our example)
• S1 … S4: Multiply by 3 (699 stitches in our example)

Configure knitting software

Once you’ve computed these stitch counts, enter them as the “bottom width” of the corresponding sections in my knitting software thus:

0. Left arm
1. S1
2. Front
3. S2
4. Right arm
5. S3
6. Back
7. S4

Validation (optional)

To confirm that you’ve gotten the math right, you can walk it back to confirm. This is optional, but you’ll spend a lot of time knitting this ruana, so I’d recommend it.

Jump to the last row of the knitting pattern and see how many stitches you have. If you multiply that number by length_per_stitch / (500 * length_per_row) / 2 you should get a number reasonably close to π.

In our example we have 4204 stitches, which gives 3.15 – good enough:

4204 * 0.3 / (500 * 0.4) / 2

Related

• Up: Knitting: Patterns