When Triangles Go Wrong

Okay, these weren't exactly triangles, but they were almost triangles (one side was curved).

I knit the middle section of this afghan first, thinking the final result would be circular like the Spinning a Yarn pattern from Woolly Thoughts I was using (and adding colors to). Then, once I was well into the spiral and grasped how the pattern worked, I wanted more excitement, and the idea of using the spiral as a middle motif was born. So I knit 4 smaller side pieces, and then I had to knit the roughly triangular shapes around the center spiral to square it out so I could join it all together.

Numbers are my friends, so how hard could that be? Hard enough that part of the back of this project looks like this:

And this:

 

 

Yes, those are flaps of knitting. What seemed like a simple task of knitting triangles with curved sections turned into a nightmare.

The first problem was that this was a spiral, not a circle, so the curves weren't regular. Each time I thought I had done the math, and each time I was sadly mistaken. I tried curves based on two circles, I tried curves based on ovals, I tried hardcore measuring.

 

Two of the triangles I managed to fudge, and two of them, well, you see the flaps on the back. I never did get the formula absolutely correct, even after a lot of work on spreadsheets. I suspect it was me more than the math, that I just translated what the spreadsheets were showing me poorly, but, well, I'll never know.

Sometimes you just get it wrong.