Half Done
The beaded shawlette is coming along. Two of the three beaded eyelet sections are done. Each section measures a bit over 5 inches (about 13 cm) vertically, so the finished piece should be about 16 inches (40 cm) from neck to point.
Because people (non-knitters) always ask me "How long did that take to make?", I decided to figure out how much knitting time will be required to complete this shawlette.
I did this by timing how long it took to work one four row repeat. Conveniently it took 1 hour; 30 minutes for the beaded row plus 30 minutes for the three non-beaded rows. The total number of stitches in those 4 rows was 846, so that's 846 stitches per hour.
Ah yes, you say, but how many stitches are in the whole shawlette? Well, as it happens I had already made an Excel spreadsheet showing the number of stitches in each row (so that I could frequently check that I still had the correct number left and right of the centre stitch). This made it easy to just add up the stitches in each row for a grand total of - are you ready? 19,679. Yup, nearly 20,000 stitches! So total knitting time will be close to 24 hours. And yes, there was a not-insignificant amount of unknitting too, which is not included.
Having come this far with the calculating, why not figure out the "value" of the finished piece. At $10 CAD (currently $8.85 USD) per hour (20% over minimum wage) plus about $50 for materials (yarn, beads, pattern, teeny tiny crochet hook, etc.) that would be - *ka-ching* - $290 ($257 USD), confirming what we already knew, that pretty much anything handknitted is essentially a luxury item.
Edited to add:
Since I made these calculations I have also had to calculate how many more beads I will need to buy. Thank you Rosie for counting 10 grams of beads for me. There were 172. Long story short I need to buy two more vials, making the total "value" of the finished piece about $300 ($266 USD). Wow.
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