Circle in rows

[Rtrdtchr]

I am going to make a rug for my new grand child. I will be using a cross stitch pattern of a bear with mountains in the background. My daughter in law would like a round rug, but I don’t know how to make it with rows instead of in a circle. Any help would be appreciated!

[bgs]

It can be done by using increases and decreases on ends of your rows like they did here

http://mainelyhandcrafts.com/crochet-handmade-plus/easter-egg-pot-holders-trivets-green-easter-pot-holders-spring-pot-holders-hot-pads-green-variegated-crochet-cotton-set-of-2/

You will have to eyeball it and are probably looking at lots of trial and error (pulling it apart and starting over

[Granny Square]

^ what she said.  The increases and decreases are going to be more extreme at the very beginning and very end, and you will probably make several rounds in the middle without increasing.

The thing is, plotting out the shape of a pot holder that is probably on the order of 10 inches wide is going to be tougher than plotting out a rug that is 3 feet wide.

There is no question you will need to make a swatch to find out how big 1 stitch is, height and width.  How big a blanket dos DIL want?  Do the math and figure out how many stitches across the max with is, and how many rows needed in the other direction.  

For illustration, let's say a 3' rug, and your stitches match the gauge on a Red Heart Super Saver ball band - 12 sc across, and 15 rows = 4".  36" divided by 4" is 9, so that would be 15x9=135 rows (from north to south, of varying widths) and 12x9=108 stitches across at the widest point.  Obviously don't use these exact numbers (unless you hit Red Heart's gauge), use YOUR gauge to do the math.

I'd rather spend time plotting on paper and erasing (I'm a little old school), than stitching and ripping.  So I'd grab some graph paper (or find printable graph paper on the web), probably taping pages together and draw an outline in pencil.

Or - if you are familiar with Excel (or other spreadsheet software) and already have it loaded on your computer, what I've done a few times is used it to plot graphs by eyeballing the column and row dimensions into squares, numbering across and down, and using the 'color fill' tool to make a graph.  If you are not familiar with spreadsheet software, this might not be easier than paper and pencil; but one nice aspect, depending on the 'picture' you are drawing, is that you can copy and paste 'chunks' of cells to quickly fill in an area.

Another Or - draw a picture in a circle without graph paper, scan it, and upload it to an app like this one -- choose 1:1 ratio, and then the grid size, if we are going with the 3' rug and the Red Heart stitch gauge, would be 120 x 160 - too big, but you can 'cut off' what you don't need-- put your picture in the center of the page to be scanned to allow for 'cut off'.

Another edit - I completely forgot Excel has a drawing tool, you could 'draw' a circle, or actually oval, covering the right number of rows and columns, with 'no fill' so you could see the cells inside the circle.  The sort of bad news is that I took the graph paper I'd already set up in Excel, shrunk it so I could see 135 rows, and the squares were pretty hard to see on a 19" screen.

Edited December 4, 2021 by Granny Square