Mindy's Stole - Part 5

We are definitely past the midpoint of Mindy's Stole now! When I finished knitting the chart where the basket weave transitions to what will become the cherry blossoms, I had to do more charts. This half of the stole is supposed to resemble a cloud of cherry blossoms blowing in the wind*. I'm representing the little bits of blossoms with YO's (negative space), rather than trying to knit a larger shape to represent the blossoms. I tried knitting blossoms and they were just too big, not at all the delicate petals that puff into pink clouds every time a breeze blows through the branches. I'm wanting just a few blossoms in the middle of the stole, increasing to lots of blossoms at the end of the stole. The problem here is that I really think they need to look pretty random. Now I could have been really mean and write the pattern as, "Over the next 224 rows, randomly work 1950 YO's with corresponding decreases, increasing the density of the YO's as you get to the end." Since I'm trying to create a pattern, not a riot, I realized I needed to chart the random petals in the wind. It's very difficult to chart random, so I sat down, divided up the second half of the stole into 7 sections (I worked the basketweave chart 7 times) and got out the calculator. I figured out what the percentage of YO's would be in the final chart and worked backwards to the middle. Then, by figuring the number of stitches on the RS rows in each section(I'm only working the pattern on the RS rows), multiplying that by the percentage of YO's for each section, I can figure out approximately how many YO's I need to put in each chart. I pretty much took the random part right out of the random end of this stole, but it seems to be working. At this point there's a lot of stockinette between the little cherry blossoms, but each chart has more and more going on, so its actually kind of fun to work. I also just started the second ball of yarn (KnitPicks Alpaca Cloud in Peppermint) and I'm thinking that two balls of yarn will be enough for the finished stole, but this half of the stole will eat up more yarn than the first half did, so I'm not guaranteeing it at this point. (Don't go out and buy just two balls of yarn right now - it might take some of a third ball.)

*I will now have Blowin' In the Wind in my head for the rest of the day.