Published by Tuhk ja Tolm OÜ
Mustri
A colourwork charting studio
com.kirivark.mustri
A place to design knitting charts, built around the bold geometric patterns of Estonian and
wider Nordic folk knitting. Every cell on the grid is one stitch; pick your yarn colours and paint the
motif row by row — stars, roses, braids, zigzags, eight-pointed blooms — and watch the band build up as it
would on a mitten cuff.
The tools follow how colourwork actually behaves. A symmetry helper mirrors a motif across an axis so
borders stay balanced, a repeat preview tiles the chart sideways so you can see the band wrap around, and
a stitch count keeps the width in view. Change the palette and the whole chart recolours at once.
Everything you make is kept in a personal gallery with its palette and grid, ready to reopen and refine; a
library of traditional motif blocks gives you something to start from, and a plain-language guide explains
how to read a chart and turn it into stitches. English and Estonian, offline, no account, no
advertising.
Mustri on Google Play
Why a band almost never repeats by accident
A band that goes round a cuff has two properties people tend to confuse. The first is
arithmetic: a motif of width w only tiles a cuff of n stitches when w divides
n exactly — which is why 60 and 72 stitches are such comfortable cast-ons and why a prime
number is a trap. The second is rarer than it looks. A band of length n is said to repeat when
it is some shorter run copied over and over, and counting those is a classical piece of combinatorics:
by Möbius inversion, the number of bands that do not repeat is
Σd|n μ(d)·kn/d, for k colours. Subtract, and you get how many
patterns of a given width genuinely have a smaller period. The panel does that exactly, in whole
numbers.
16,777,216different bands of this length
6motif widths that tile it (beyond a single stitch)
12widest motif that still repeats twice
4,336bands that do have a smaller period
0.0258%of every possible band
16,772,880that are one-of-a-kind all the way round
Not on this bench: no grid, no motif, no colours and nothing drawn. It never
shows a pattern and could not design one. It counts how many could exist, which is a different question
and a much easier one.