A Favorite Knitting Tool

I'm making steady progress on my Nonpareil sweater, but since it's knit in pieces I don't yet have much in the way of photographic evidence of that progress.

So far I've finished the back piece and am well over halfway through the left front piece and it seems relatively successful, but I am worried about the size since it's the first time I've made something like this that I couldn't try on along the way.  My fingers are still crossed as far as that's concerned, but the knitting has grabbed my attention and the yarn is nice and soft to work with so I'm making progress either way.

I have been relying heavily on one of my favorite knitting tools for this project -- a nifty calculator for increasing stitches evenly across a row.  There's probably a reason for it, but I'm still getting used to large patterns like this one that only give you directions like:

Cast on 40 stitches... purl across row, increasing 10 stitches...

that leave it up to the knitter to figure out how to make those increases work out neatly.  Since someone bright has already figured out a good formula for it, I rely on the calculator for those points in the pattern.

But now I also find myself relying on the calculator for other things as well.  This particular pattern has you knit the waistband as a separate section, then pick up stitches along the edges of the waistband to knit above and below it.  Of course, the pattern tells you how long to knit the waistband in inches and then how many stitches to pick up along it, but at least in my case that length never works out to the right number of clear points for picking up stitches along the edge.  So, I've been giving the calculator the number of possible stitches I see along the edge and the number I'll need to find somewhere to get up to the required number to pick up, and then I use the provided formula to tell me where to cheat in the extra stitches (in place of the m1 in the formula).  I think it's made the process for this sweater much, much smoother than if I'd been trying to just eyeball the pick up and knits to get to the required number along each side.  (There was a baby sweater where I picked up the stitches for a button placket at least 4 times before I got the right number of stitches that didn't seem puckered all in one spot or generally uneven, so I'm definitely familiar with doing it poorly.)

So while I'm not halfway yet, I'm getting there.  Of course I'm not sure if I bought the right amount of yarn for a sweater in this size, since I originally bought the yarn for a different pattern in the booklet, but I'll worry about that when I'm closer to the end.  The yarn is pretty new still and seems fairly popular, so I don't think it would be a problem to get more.  I also remember someone at Stitches mentioning that the patterns seemed to err quite a bit on the high side in yarn requirements for that booklet, so maybe I'll luck out with what I have.  Besides, it may never get to the sweater stage if I can't make it past all of the seaming, which is not something I've had a lot of successful practice with yet.