Posting might end up being a little bit lighter for the next few weeks. Hmm, let's see:

Last week: Out of town for a day for work, which involved leaving my house around 5:45am and not getting back until after 11pm that day. Took me about 4 days to fully recover.

This week: Out of town for work, a day and a half this time.

This weekend: Inlaws up for a visit. Intensive costumery* whenever I have time in between for the next week and a half. I THINK I have plenty of time to finish, but I will surely relax once everything's done.

Next weekend: Sitacon, where we'll find out if our costumes are totally embarrassing or not. Other nerdfulnesses.

Week/weekend after: On the other extreme of my nerdiness, Rhinebeck. Also, NYC touristy stuff with Madam. So excited!

Lots of time-consuming stuff. All fun, but it's a lot to keep track of in the near future.

*I haven't even talked about J's and my cosplay stuff at all, have I? I'll talk about that this week if I have a chance, now that it's all coming together. It's been a huge boost for my confidence at seamstressing, certainly.

Often in our lives, we come up against incorrect assumptions that we didn't even realize we held until we stop for just a moment to think about them.

The scales that just fell away from *my* eyes? Warren Buffett is not the same person as Jimmy Buffett. A half-second of thought would have told me this, but nevertheless I've been humming "Margaritaville" lately after every NPR business news segment.

A long, long time ago, I finished a scarf, and I said all sorts of ridiculous things about preparing the pattern in a few weeks and selling it in, like, March or something.

The pattern has been complete for a while (thanks in large part to Fillyjonk's feedback as she worked on it.) But I wanted some nice enticing-looking pictures to go with it, and several photoshoots left me grumpy at my limited abilities. Plus, I felt a little intimidated about the whole pattern-selling thing. I don't consider myself particularly artistic, and I REALLY don't consider myself very fashionable. Would anyone even give this a second look?

Finally last week I said "this is enough". It was a gorgeous day outside, and if I couldn't make it look pretty, it couldn't be done.

I finally found something that made me happy, and I posted the pattern, where it is right now, if you're interested. (If you're interested and not on Ravelry, let me know and I can send you a buy-it-now link. It's 5$.)
*
Three people have purchased it so far! I'm really excited about the feedback it's getting.


That's it, just above. That's the picture I was finally pleased with. After hours of careful arranging and playing with camera settings, and many dozens of pictures, none of which were right, after all that? The far-and-away best picture was taken when I flung the scarf up into the air and tried to catch a picture before it fell to earth.

I learn.

* The necklace just barely peeping out from under the scarf was made by the same woman who made the piece of jewelry that originally inspired this pattern. Her stuff is gorgeous, and worth looking at, so do so.

Spinning for a specific project, part 4: I love calculations.

From Part 2:

"Second job is to figure out how much yardage the sleeves need vs. the body of the garment (which can be figured from the pattern alone). I'll turn that into a ratio of sleeve yardage:body yardage (counting the sleeves together, and splitting those numbers in two later when it's convenient)."

We know from the previous part that it's about 255 yards for the body and both the sleeves all together. The designer made this part relatively easy for us, in that there are no increases or decreases here, so the ratio of cast-on stitches will be the same as the ratio of the whole area, and therefore the yardage. Each sleeve is 50 stitches around, and the body is 220 stitches around. I'll count the sleeves together for now.

100 (stitches for sleeves)/320 (total stitches)=31%.

31% of 255 (total yardage)=80 yards for both sleeves together.

255-80= 175 yards for the body.

With the color gradation I'm doing, it'd be slightly easier to deal with too much yarn (where I'd just cut the yarn and start again at the right place just after the reflection point) than too little (because then I'd have to cut the yarn, spin some of the center color, do that for a bit, then start up again). So I'm going to round up again, to 90 and 180 yards, respectively. That also gives each sleeve exactly 1/4 the yardage of the body, which makes the numbers a bit easier.
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"Third job: convert the yardage of the sweater pattern into the total weight of fiber I'll need to spin to get everything to work right."

This is actually a pretty mushy number, depending on my spinning style, the fiber, the tightness of the spinning, etc., etc. Handspun can be puffier and airier than commercial yarn, or twice as dense. My basic knitting yarn-type spinning is usually about 1/4 more dense than the commercial equivalent, so I'm going to add 25% to the number I get from a commercial yarn estimate and aim to spin something very much like the commercial yarn.

I'm knitting the rest of the sweater in Cascade 220, so that's a good place to start. It's 220 yards per 3.5 ounces, or about 63 yards per ounce. I need 180 yards of yarn for the body, about 2.9 ounces. Adding a mushy 25% to take the handspun yarn into account puts me close enough to 3.5 ounces to leave that nice round number (and rounding down because I rounded up last time). The sleeves use half that yardage, so they'll take about 1.75 ounces.

Whew. That's starting to get to real fiber I can actually weigh out and start spinning!
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"Fourth job: Actually figuring out how the fiber is going to be arranged, so I can figure out how much of each fiber I'll need."

All right. Four fibers: Dark gray, Medium Gray, Oatmeal, and White. I'll call them D,M,O, and W, for short. I want to make a 3-ply yarn that transitions one color at a time. I think it's easiest to set it up so that one ply is always changing first, one always in the middle, and one is always last. This way when I'm plying, I can see which ones are coming up next, and if I do something truly tragic and they're coming up all wrong, I'll know sooner rather than later and can fix the problem then. They're going to transition from darkest to lightest and back to darkest again.

Here's what I think I'll need. A single ply is being "read" from top to bottom, here, and the plied yarn at any given place will be the color as "read" across. If that makes sense.

DDD
DDM
DMM
MMM
MMO
MOO (heehee)
OOO
OOW
OWW
WWW
WWW (twice because it makes the numbers easy)
WWO
WOO (heehee)
OOO
OOM
OMM
MMM
MMD
MDD
DDD

If each single letter there uses the same amount of fiber, how much of each color do I need? Good question.
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"Fifth job: converting the total weight of fiber into the relative amounts of fiber of each color needed (more ratios, there).

So I'm going to pretend that each letter on that goofy list up above represents one unit of fiber, the size of which I don't know yet. But at least I can figure out how many of each I'm going to use: 12 D's, 18 M's, 18 O's, 12 W's. That works out to a 2:3:3:2 ratio, nice little numbers, and if I add them together that makes 10, another nice round little number. Which means that a 1 in that ratio would equal 0.35 ounces of fiber (because it's 3.5 all together).

Whoo! Easy! So the total amount of fiber needed for the body is:

0.7 ounces of dark grey. 1.05 ounces of medium gray. 1.05 ounces of the oatmeal. 0.7 ounces of the white.

You do the same thing for the sleeves and you get: 0.35 ounces dark grey. 0.53 ounces of medium gray. 0.53 ounces of the oatmeal. 0.35 ounces of the white.

Schweet. Calculation's all done! Time to get weighing and spinning.

Spinning for a specific project, part 3: Figuring out the total yardage needed.

I'm working on figuring out how much of a contrasting color I'll need to work on the colorwork bands at the bottom of a sweater. Because of the way I'm spinning this yarn (in bands of color that will line up with certain parts of the pattern), the numbers need to be fairly exact.

This is easy, right? The pattern says 2 balls of 158 yards each. 316 yards. Now, on to step tw....*rrrr* hold up. I'm knitting the third-largest size. The amount of contrast color yarn listed by size goes (2,2,2,2,3). People knitting two sizes smaller and one size larger can't *all* be using exactly 316 yards. I'm going to assume that the designer did a fair job of calculating yardages, and that a person knitting one size larger would end up using something very close to 316 yards, with a little extra. Maybe 280, just to make it a nice round number. (There's maybe 20 yards that get used as a narrow edging around the hood and bottom, I'm subtracting that bit out because I'll do something different there.)

The colorwork in all the sweaters is identical--20 rows, no decreasing or increasing, same patterning. The only thing that changes is the width. Therefore, we can pretend we're knitting two very large simple tubes consisting of the sleeve plus body width, and make some nice soothing ratios. On the one-size-larger size that we're basing the numbers above on, the body is 240 stitches around and each sleeve is 60 stitches around, making our theoretical tube 360 stitches around (one body plus two sleeves). The sweater in *my* size is 220 stitches around, and 50 stitches around for the sleeves, so 320 stitches in this theoretical large tube. 320/360=89%. The bottom of my sweater is 89% the size of the larger one. My total yardage will also be 89% of the larger one. 89% of 280 is 249.2. So, I'll need about 250 yards total of contrasting color yarn for both the sleeves and body. Let's round up to 255 just because--I round up here because I felt like I rounded down last time. It is my whimsical way of faking accuracy, and works a disturbing percentage of the time.

(Note: I mentioned before that there are other ways of doing this which will largely depend on the way you think about the world. I can picture a method involving graphing that would probably be more precise. Better ways of doing this, or ways that more effectively use your own toolbox of methodologies, are left as an exercise to the reader.)

J links to this article and says "Naw, really?"

But it pleases me deeply, because it's talking about the population at large moving away from blank-faced packages labeled "DIET", and towards food that is less processed, more local, and more enjoyable.

It does make me wonder if this indicates any trend away from the whole health=weight fallacy. If you lose five pounds doing terrible and stupid things to your body, you're probably less healthy than when you started.

The article reminded me that one thing I wish is that there was a word for "making modest changes to the way I eat because I feel better and am healthier when I've made those changes". The word certainly friggin' isn't "diet", because I'll go on a diet is the day I shoot myself in the head.

But I do make modest changes all the time. Minor, true examples: Reminding myself that I feel worse after eating 3 huge cookies not better, so maybe I should only eat one serving dessert-like thing a day. Making it a goal to cook all the veggies in the house before they go bad (this never involves buying fewer veggies, btw). Planning to make lunch for us every day for a week (this week's thing, as it happens). Remembering to have a snack handy so I don't get hungry enough to just find the thing that fills me up fastest and jam it in.

I usually feel better when I've made them, but I don't feel like I failed if I find some very sad summer squash in the crisper once in a while. They're usually in a general direction of "healthier" so long as (this is important) I'm not doing some other, less healthy thing to "cheat". An example of cheating that I'm trying to avoid: The last time I went to the doc's, my cholesterol tested high. I'm almost-always borderline, but this was just a bit past that. So I'm cutting down on eggs, buttery baked goods, and high-fat dairy, and picking out breakfast cereals that are more fibery and lower in saturated fat (*sigh* so long, frequent granola). What I'm NOT doing is replacing those foods with artifice-stuffed crap that equates low fat with goodness. I'm just making lunch in a larger container that fits a salad beautiful enough to not require cheese. I'm having a normal dinner at my weekly Wegman's knitting group, and deciding an hour into it if I'm hungry enough for a muffin or cookie instead of buying one right away. I'm having one egg for Sunday breakfast, with extra fruit salad.

Each a little thing. What I've noticed in the intervening few months is that the grocery items that are urgent when we're out have changed. Cheese used to be high up there, now it's hummus. Because of the hummus, it's wheat pita. Because of those, I'm happier with "big salad" lunches, and have had no problem with eating them 3-4 days a week all summer long. Because of *that*, I need more lettuce, nuts, and dried fruit (dried fruit is the easiest damn thing for bento-style lunches. Doesn't go bad, requires zero prep, fits into almost any space). Because I always have dried fruit on hand, oatmeal sounds more appealing.

So let's count. Things eaten less often (I can tell this is actually working by looking at the weekly grocery list): eggs, cheese. Things eaten *more* often: hummus, pita, salad, dried fruit, oatmeal.

A rough decision to determine which is healthier, I know. All that garbage food.

Thing is, it would also have been quite easy for the second list to sound like this: Low-fat ice cream because I need a treat! (leading to) Low-fat hot fudge because I deserve it! (and) waffle-making ingredients! (also requiring) More maple syrup! Not that any of those things are bad on their own, mind. But it's not the same as any list that includes a happy salad eater. Plus, the mindset that created that second list is a mindset that will get a lower cholesterol score and go back to eating eggs and cheese to celebrate, only twice as much, because it's a celebration! Until the celebration becomes the new normal.

Sigh. Anyways, I'm glad that people are thinking more about eating reasonable portions of delicious things and enjoying them, instead of having to say "it was terrible, but at least I'm full."

Spinning for a specific project, Part 2: Setting up the calculations.

So the first thing to understand is that a chemist's training is largely a training in ratios and unit conversion. How much X do I need to add to Y to make Z? How much X should I add if Y is really expensive and X is cheap, and I want to waste as little Y as possible? What if X is a liquid and Y is a solid, how will I figure out the volume of X to add? etc, etc. Although my Ph.D. is in materials, chemistry is still my training, the way I think about the world, the first toolbox I pull out when confronted with a problem. Even when that problem is a fibery one.

Now I'm presented with a game, a little puzzle to play with. The clues? A pattern that includes 5 different sizes of sweater and the yarn requirements for them. The knowledge that I have 4 colors of yarn, and want a 3-ply yarn with gradual gradations from darkest to lightest and back again. Breaking off the yarn is cheating--The yarn that composes the entire colorwork section for each motif should be continuous. Because of this, I know that the rate of color change for the sleeves will have to be faster than for the body, because each round is smaller, and the motif is the same size for both.

This is my game, so it's my toolbox. Ratios and unit conversion.

First job is to figure out the total yardage needed (which will depend on bits from several different parts of the pattern, and is the most guesstimation-heavy).

Second job is to figure out how much yardage the sleeves need vs. the body of the garment (which can be figured from the pattern alone). I'll turn that into a ratio of sleeve yardage:body yardage (counting the sleeves together, and splitting those numbers in two later when it's convenient)

Third job: convert the yardage of the sweater pattern into the total weight of fiber I'll need to spin to get everything to work right. The weight of the body fiber and the sleeve fiber will have to get separated out, here. (this would be unit conversion; switching my information from yardage, which is unusable under these conditions, to weight, which is useful.)

Fourth job: Actually figuring out how the fiber is going to be arranged, so I can figure out how much of each fiber I'll need (neither ratios nor unit conversion, for once).

Fifth job: converting the total weight of fiber into the relative amounts of fiber of each color needed (more ratios, there).

Then, you know, the actual spinning. And the finding out if I did this right. We'll find out together. I did all the math over the weekend, but I don't have a scale at home, so I'm bringing one color into work every day and weighing out the various bits of fiber when it's quiet. I've done some spinning samples, but that's it; if this is a failure it'll be a very public one.

The hand's all better now, just took a few hours. But one of the tuning pegs on my guitar stopped doing it's job, so I have to take it down to the guitar shop before I play any more.

While I was traveling the week before last, I had started on the Threepenny Pullover from the Fall 2004 Interweave Knits, using the navy blue Cascade 220 I have in my stash. The patterning wasn't so bad, just really slow because the knitting was hard to read, in part because the yarn was so dark. The yarn was so dark, in fact, that all that fancy pattering was getting completely lost. After 2 inches of patterning, it was clearly time to rip.

So, the plan that went with that yarn for years is gone. What to do instead? I wandered around Ravelry looking for something interesting, but I needn't have gone that far. The sweater that caught my eye on Ravelry was actually one from the exact same issue of IK, the Huntington Castle hoodie, which has a wide but simple colorwork band around the bottom of the body and sleeves. The blue is the right weight. The yardage is pretty close, but if I'm running low I can always omit the hoodie, which I might do even if I'm not running low on yarn. I know I was just complaining about colorwork and sweaters worked in the round, but this one isn't entirely constructed that way, so I can work the sleeves without having to hold the rest of the dang sweater in my lap. Plus, it's worsted weight, 19st/4 inches. I haven't worked in that large a gauge in a LONG time (excepting J's slippers which took all of one afternoon, it's been since spring of last year, as it turns out). This will be a quick knit. Onward.

As this was floating around in my head, it cross-pollinated with an entirely different idea. As I'd mentioned before, I bought several natural shades of wool roving at Mind's Eye Yarns, and thought that I would use them to play around with multi-ply shading. (This is something that bangs around in my head regularly, and to me is one of the super-cool aspects of spinning ones' own yarn. another example.)

The thing that finally came together in my head was to use a progressively-shaded yarn as the colorwork component to the sweater. It's going to be dark brown on either end, and white in the very middle, with 4 shades of wool used all together. It'll be a 3 ply yarn, with one color swapped out at a time, which should yield a fairly subtle overall shading effect.

Step one involved lots of calculations. More on that tomorrow.

Preliminary things, the reasons for which will become clear in a moment: 1) I have a guitar that I left at home when I went to grad school--there was never a good way of getting it out there, and I was never much of a musician anyhow. 2) I brought it back here on my most recent trip. 3) When I'm trying to think of what to type, I hold my pinky and ring fingers slightly above the keyboard.

So, now that I have my beautiful guitar back in my life, I goofed around for about an hour this afternoon. Was impressed by my own 10-year-old memory of tabs, was sad that lack of practice hasn't made me any better, cursed Jonathan Coulton for using crazy chords. Played until my fingers cried uncle, then set the guitar aside and went to email my dad about a minor technical difficulty (if my dad wasn't my dad, this would be the equivalent of me calling the LHC about a broken toaster.)

I paused, pinkies in the air, when I heard a noise. *clatterclatterCLATTERclatter* Whazzat? Oh, just my pinky finger, so tired after the guitar practice that it can't even hold itself up, shaking violently.

It's pretty impressive, actually. I hold my hand limp, and it's well-behaved. I try to do, well, *anything*, and off it goes! Hopefully it will calm down soon.

Yesterday at the lab I did something very like the "finding 20$ you didn't know you'd lose in a little-used pocket" trick, except reaplace the phrase "little-used pocket" with "back corner of a messy lab drawer I hadn't been in before" and for "$20" substitute "10,000 bucks worth of high-purity platinum".

A big deal, and not at the same time. I've ordered that much since April.

Every once in a while I have a conversation with a non-scientist friend about how expensive science is. The thing that is unexpected to me is that it always *scares* them. A few years back, a friend who was a history grad student was brought on a tour of some physics lab on campus.

"They had this one thing that they said cost a *million* dollars. Can you believe that?"

"Yup. I don't know how much it cost to build Aladdin, but considering the number of staff, it certainly costs more than a million a year just to keep running, and in a way that's only one instrument. Plus, if you screw up badly enough you can wreck the whole place's experiments for a few weeks. Thankfully, I never did."

"I couldn't even breathe in the lab, I was so worried I'd break something. I can't imagine actually doing things in there."

I'm always surprised that the price tag on equipment crosses the mind of people who don't have to buy it, and that the resulting feeling is one of "I would be afraid to touch that". These are people who touch one-of-a-kind manuscripts, or who have skydived, or who peacefully protest under conditions that could get them arrested. All that's much more scary to me.

Really, mucking with instruments all day looks very boring. Today, I wiggled two barely-accessible knobs back and forth tiny amounts while watching numbers on a computer screen, for about 10 minutes. Earlier, I'd vacuumed in an awkward space, and started up the dishwasher. I could make it sound cooler than that, and obviously *I* think it's cooler than that because I'll gush about my job to anyone who will listen. But seriously, waiting for numbers to change, vacuuming, dishes. Not scary.

When people ask me what I do all day, I don't think they're imagining that the answer involves me wrestling with an armful of sproingy vacuum hose, one end of which has attached itself to the knee of my bunny suit. (That's a disposable one, mine comes in 3 pieces and gets kept all week).

One thing to keep in mind with the expensive equipment: the people who make it know it's expensive. They know that the people who pay for it don't want a million-dollar doorstop because one grad student fell asleep. As a result, there are a fair number of safety checks, failsafes, and interlocks, all of which are there to prevent anyone from hurting themselves or the instrument.

It's usually possible to break the cool toys, of course. But now that I'm helping to keep a lot-of-million-dollars-worth of equipment running, I know that the majority of instrument problems aren't caused by profoundly stupid scientists. Profoundly stupid scientists can't get any data, decide a perfectly-functioning instrument is broken, and leave the equipment to the keen and attentive scientists.

No, the thing that causes instruments to break is the same thing that killed your cell phone, the '87 Honda Accord your mom gave you, or the hard-to-reach light in your fridge: it's that Stuff Wears Out.

And million-dollar Stuff is usually easier to fix than 10$-at-Walmart Stuff. It has to be.

So, I've been gone, which you may have noticed. I spent the last week visiting very-nearly every family member I have. Somewhere in the middle of that, I also met up with some internet friends.

(Conversation with my husband:

Me: Spider and Muskie are both free on Tuesday, so we're going to go yarn shopping then! Yay!
He: Do the spider and the muskie have real names?
Me: ......probably.
He: Do you even know what these people look like?
Me: ....I've seen things they've knitted!
He: If you'd met anywhere EXCEPT via knitting websites, I'm sure I'd find this creepy. It's the wholesomest possible sketchy Internet meetup.)

Anyways, they were very nice and permitted me to spend wildly on foofy soaps and fibers. I bought 4 ounces each of three varying grey-brown shades of wool roving, not super-soft but chock full of sheepiness. Since I already have some very dark and very light colored fiber, I'm thinking about doing some interesting shaded yarns. I probably have enough fiber all together for a sweater, but it's more likely that I'll play with these things in smaller amounts. Gently-shaded mitten sets, perhaps?