Fishies!

More baby-making means more baby blanket-making. (I'm only focused on the latter. Fear not.) Following the directions here, and using many leftover bits of yarn, I'm knitting many fish.

My fishy plan is to knit half the fish in shades of blue, and half in bright colors. My thought is that by alternating blue with non-blue, it'll make it look like all the bright fish are swimming the same direction in blue water, like so:


Knitting fish doesn't take very long, is fun, and makes something adorable. They're also good now that the temperature has shot up, as my two main projects would involve holding most of a sweater on my lap. I'm really enjoying them so far.

Science day!

Something you need to understand, if you don't already: all chemists love explosions. I can tell stories about the 5-foot fountain of orange sludge I got the time a prof forgot to mention to add the hydrogen donor SLOWLY when doing a Grignard, or the time a coworker cleared out our whole building and utterly destroyed a fume hood when a canister of pressurized hydrogen chloride popped (HCl, when it goes into water, is hydrochloric acid. Just the water in the air was enough to rust holes into most of the air system.) If I tell these stories to most people, they're surprised, or they laugh. Chemists will cut me off as soon as they see the punchline coming with a similar story involving singed eyebrows or clouds of purple smoke, told with the relish of the truly deranged.

Don't judge--it's just how we're made.

This means that this video showing increasingly violent reactions of water with alkaline metals is about the best thing I've ever seen (it may be helpful to take a quick peek at the periodic table before you click that link, noting in particular the leftmost column of elements). Most chem classes will show that sodium reacts strongly with water, putting out a little yellow flame, and simply say "Alkali metals get less stable as you move down the periodic table." To see proof... well, it just pleases me more than I can say.

And yes, I've had conversations with friends about Great Practical Jokes That Could Be Made Better With Cesium, though now I've seen just how destructive it is, maybe I'd use rubidium instead.

Also, one of my officemates and I just spent 20 minutes trying to figure out how to convince our boss that we needed some pure rubidium. Compared what I use on an average day, it's positively cheap! Come on!
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If you have any interest in learning more about science, I can't recommend Seed Magazine highly enough. J picked up a copy when we were in Chicago, and it's really, really neat. The explanations are understandable without talking down to the audience and it's got some beautiful pictures. They're making a point of being somewhat controversial--there's a theory of sentient life extinction in this issue that's been rolling around in my brain all week. Almost all the books they reviewed have gone on my To Read list.

But what I think is most valuable is that they do a good job of explaining why you should care, and what you can contribute (this issue's big article was on global warming, and included these little postcards pre-addressed to important people). Since the tagline is "Science is Culture", it makes sense that they've got both halves right.

There's also a blog associated with the magazine. It's a good mix of stuff; definitely something I could spend a lot of time with.

I mentioned yesterday that I'd done a significant amount of knitting during the first section of our trip--it was actually enough that now I have more than one update waiting in the wings. If you hadn't noticed, craft stuff has been thin on the ground lately, as work picks up and nice weather sends me outside for long walks.



The body's done!

12 hours of being in a car is apparently enough time to knit from the beginning of the armholes to the shoulders.

At this point, there are 4 uncut steeks on the body: the front center, which will turn the sweater into a cardigan; the arm not-holes-yet, which I talked about last week, and the neck, which begins at that white yarn in the center, and which took me about half an hour of thinking about before I trusted the pattern. I'm fairly good at picturing 3-D objects, but in order to move them around in my mind I need to actually move my hands in the direction I want the image to move. As an undergrad, this meant that professors sometimes thought I was signaling the answers to other students until they watched me for a few minutes. Now, people on the bus just think I'm crazy, turning my hands slowly in midair with my eyes closed, cutting imaginary steeks.

The only problem with steeks--little flaps of connective knitting tissue where holes for arms and heads will eventually be--is that, while the body of the sweater looks done, tempting to try on, actually trying it on isn't quite so successful:



Total time: One week.

Towns I spent a good amount of time in: 6.

Hours spent in a car: 23

Hours spent on a bus: 6

Hours spent on/near a plane: 3

Hours spent on public transit: 2 or so, not counting going to work.

Accidental Naps: Too numerous to count.

Foot blisters: 4, all on the last day. Curse my beautiful Converse All-Stars.

Knitting accomplished: Significant, until the Traveling Crazies got me, then, insignificant.

Graduations celebrated: 2

Marriages "": 1

Other major life decisions "": 1

Alma maters visited: 3, not including the recently-graduated hanging out after the ceremony.

Silly notes left for old professors: 1 (including the phrase "Thanks for the P-Chem-ories", which I'm proud of.)

Truly great you-had-to-be-there one-liners: 2

Autographs signed: 1

Different beds slept in: 5

Awful meals eaten: 1

Fabulous meals eaten: 5

Commemerative pictures taken: 0 (because I can't be trusted to bring a camera anywhere.)

Commemerative t-shirts bought: 1

Pile of work waiting for me when I got back: Large

Gratitude for work instead of travel: Even Larger.

It'll be quiet here for about a week, again. Back soon, popkins.

I'm working on my Sweaters From Camp sweater again. In progress pictures can get boring, though. Case in point:






I'm just shy of the fourth repeat, so it looks ex-friggin-zactly the same. I started to take a picture last night, but eh.

With the end of the fourth repeat, however, comes fun stuff, in the form of sleeve steeks. The construction is actually pretty interesting on this sweater. Most colorwork sweaters and "beginner" sweaters I've seen have what is called a drop sleeve, which looks a little something like this:

(here's an example of how it looks in real life)

There's a lot of sweaters like this out there, because it's easy to to. The body's just one big unshaped piece, and the sleeves are straight across the top.

Unfortunately, drop sleeve sweaters don't fit most people well. Our shoulders are lumpybumpy, but the sweater isn't, so unless we hold our arms out like flapping birds all the time, the fabric has to make up the difference by stretching over the shoulder and bulging underneath it.

The best fitting shirts and sweaters have shaped armholes, like so:

And a real life sample I've knit here. You'll notice that the angle of the arms relative to the body is much closer to the actual angle at which you hold your arms while walking around, and so the fabric doesn't need to lump around much to suit your natural stance. On the other hand, weird shapes are required, and these can be annoying to design around, especially with colorwork.

There are lots of things in between. You can make the armhole much more narrow (decreasing the fabric that can bulge out) and put in a tiny diamond of fabric underneath the armpit (so the person can get the sweater on), like in this sweater I made last summer.

You can also make the body slightly indented where the sleeves will go, which splits the difference--a very small amount of rectangular shaping, a slightly improved fit. This is, indirectly, what the sweater I'm working on does: where my arms are, I'll put a bunch of stitches onto a holder, putting a dent on each side of the sweater body. The thing that I think is clever is that when I start knitting the sleeve, the holder-stitches make a pattern that is then continued on the sleeve, which is sort of shown in this picture I drew right when I first started planning this sweater:

On my sweater, this continuous panel has my initials going down the center, with a polymer chain flanking on either side. It fits perfectly, and I'm really looking forward to seeing how that bit of the design works once I can wear the sweater.

The ability to incorporate some continuity into a pattern is yet another detail that actually makes life easier on a handknitter, while simultaneously being something that would be difficult to do by machine. It's as satisfying as a big equation that cancels down to just one factor.

More about my trip:

So after hanging out with my mom and J in DC, I went to a conference, which was fantastic. Lots of good talks by people whose papers I read, lots of people who already understand and believe the premise of our work, so I didn't have to retill that old garden.

My poster was in the last row, far from the free food. Here was the view from my poster:



Not so inviting.

Then I went and looked at other posters, and this one made me do a quintuple-take:



Yes, that word before "laminin" is what you think it is. I think it's the name for a small piece of a particular protein, but I'm afraid to Google, for obvious reasons. The poster presenters were all from a German university, so I'm guessing they didn't know the other meaning.

And then I came home, and collapsed in a heap.
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So, Gir has been very popular recently. A lot of people have been linking to him. And for the first time, someone else made him! And made him do things! And took pictures!

The one where he's rubbing his tummy is my desktop background right now. So cute. And I'm so glad that other people can follow my directions, since he was made in a bunch of pieces and with some sort of odd construction. Huzzah!

My subconscious decided I'd been asleep long enough at about 9:15 on Sunday morning, and promptly replaced a crazy dream I only half remember with a normal scene of J and I lounging on the couch with a pile of books and papers between us.

In the dream, there was no baby nearby and I wasn't pregnant, but J and I were very seriously choosing a name for a theoretical son (maybe we were adopting, I don't know).

"So, J, I know you've said how important it is for you to honor your family, so how about we make his middle name Balls*, after your grandmother's maiden name?"

"That's great. And since this name was on both of our lists of names we like, how about we make his first name Eton?"

"Phew, we're finally settled then. Eton Balls [J's last name]."

The force of this horrible name was enough to rip me awake and immediately jump out of bed, laughing to the point of tears, shouting "Eton Balls [lastname]! Eton! Balls!" at a very surprised J.

This isn't the first time I've been woken up by a particularly terrible pun my subconscious has come up with, but it's the first time I still found the pun funny the next day. Where did that crazy name come from, anyhow?

*Balls isn't an actual family name, this was one of those dream-reality moments.

I've been back for a few days, but I've been dealing with that mental state where I have so many little thinky-bits floating around that I can't organize them, and end up doing nothing.

If you think this is bad for blogging, you should see my thesis outline.

So here are some random thinky things; others will show up later when I download some pictures.

Traveling:

Spinning in a public place like an airport is the closest I'll ever get to knowing what life is like for a famous person. Lots of people sitting nearby would watch me carefully, not saying anything, and some people walking by stopped dead in their tracks for a moment or two before remembering their flight.

About half the people who actually said something to me were polite about it, asking if I could be interrupted or waiting until I'd paused before leaning over and asking a question.

But the people in that tiny leftover percentage? Whew. More than one person--adult, normal looking people that probably lead perfectly sensible lives--literally shouted "WHAT'S THAT THING?" across a crowded seating area, assuming that I instantly knew that they were talking to me, and which part they were pointing to. I was spinning on the plane, and a woman sitting behind me reached between the seats for my spindle, without a word until I jumped back. Scared the crap out of me to suddenly have a clutching, disembodied hand in front of my face when I was deep in Spinning Trance Land.

Interestingly, if I spin on the bus people are a lot more reasonable. Is this because riding the bus is more quotidien than flying and vacation mode eats peoples' brains? Because bus riders are used to seeing people do crazy things? Because people about to board an airplane are more likely to have anxiety-reducing medications coursing through their veins which reduce inhibitions about other people's personal space? Who knows.

Washington DC:



I was in Washington for the first half of the week, going to a gorgeous, fantastic wedding and doing the tourist thing with my mom and J. I've recently been thinking about jobs in more administrative settings, like some of the things available at the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, but maybe I'll start looking for similar things at the state level. DC was approaching "too hot and muggy for J to survive" even in April, and the suit-to-slacker ratio's a little high for my tastes.

I had a few bad moments when we first arrived, somewhere between nostalgia, anti-nostalgia (like looking at the past through poo-colored glasses), and full-on-panic-attack mode. I'm sure the Germans have an umlautted name for the feeling. weltschmerzenfreudenbratwurstblitz, or something. I hadn't been to DC since I was about 4, when my mom and I moved down there briefly to live with an asshole. I remember just enough to be glad my mom hightailed it out of there, but I was afraid of remembering anything I didn't want to. It took me until the next day when we were on a bus that happened to go right past where we lived that I finally calmed down. I did remember things more clearly there, but nothing beyond the little things that strike a 4-year-old's imagination--rainy, muggy days, brick houses with azaleas in the front, big mushrooms in the grass and slugs everywhere else.

Knitting:

I haven't been knitting much at all, though I've started a few projects, which is stupid considering I HAVEN'T BEEN KNITTING MUCH AT ALL.

I was, however, doing some blog reading and I thought that this and this post, both talking about the knitbloggers-getting-book-deals phenomenon (or the one-knitblogger-in-particular-getting-a-book-deal pheomenon), were very interesting, and I thought I'd put some of my comments over there up here.

The terms "process-focused knitter" and "product-focused knitter" show up with some frequency. A purely product focused knitter (as with all things in life, there's a continuum) knits because they want a specific thing. Knitting is a means to an end. On the other hand, a purely process-focused knitter knits because they like the activity of knitting, and is less concerned with needing the final item. Those who put knitters into these two subcategories tend to describe process knitters as likely to advance in their skills, while a product knitter will see no need to expand their horizons because a garter stitch scarf keeps the neck just as warm as a complex cabled one.

The problem with defining it like this is, I have several friends that have no interest in extending their skills precisely because they like the process of knitting too much to get frustrated learning something new. I'd consider them process knitters--they love the feeling of yarn in their hands, they have no problem giving away what they've made, they enjoy having something to do to relax while watching tv--but their process is a nonanalytical one.

I'd consider myself more process than product, but for me the process that I enjoy is figuring out the best way of doing something, exploring other options, asking questions. Knitting is fun, but thinking while knitting is the most fun. So there's a subcategory in there somewhere.

The problem is, the people who have that more analytical side aren't the ones getting book deals, and I think that's a damn shame. I haven't been reading her lately, but Wendy used to say that she didn't like something about the style of something she made (usually big and boxy) and then her next project would be... a big and boxy sweater. There's enough joking self-deprecation going on a Mason-Dixon Knitting that it's sort of hard to tell, but they mostly fly by the seat of their pants and make friends with simple techniques. I've read only enough on the Yarn Harlot to figure out that she manages to say "knitting" a lot without actually talking about knitting.

Meanwhile, as far as I know, people who are writing interesting analytical blogs like Eunny and String or Nothing are plugging away on their own projects without publishers banging down their doors. Frankly, they could organize their already-existing entries by topic and bind the result and I'd buy it; it's too bad that publishers keep going for the lowest common knitting denominator.

Oleo:

I seem to be making friends with the semicolon. The dash has been my changing-horses-in-midstream indicator of choice since I started blogging; I'm not sure how this new infiltrator has worked his way into my paragraphs.

Next time:

Magic bathroom posters. The ethereal beauty of Pittsburgh. The many moods of Gir. Maybe a finalized version of Senor Brain Slug (who was hiding in a picture of himself on the last entry, if you didn't notice).