Secret Crochet Flowers

I haven't been posting many pictures, because I seem to have been mostly doing secret projects.



These flowers were for a swop on knittingforums. We were supposed to have knitted during May and sent them by the beginning of June.

I choose a pattern from Knitting Loves Crochet, for the Ice-blue Openwork scarf. The knitting was easy, but there were also a load of crochet flowers. Each flower took a lot longer to make then I was expecting. When it came to sewing them in place - each flower had 4 ends to finish, and was held in place by 5 sets of two or three stitches. There were over 100 bits of sewing to do, on a three colour scarf!

It finally got posted a month late and the package had arrived. However the woman I'd knitted for was away and hadn't seen it. So I didn't want to put pictures on my blog, jon the off-chance she saw them.

I thought the leek looked fresh

Today's tea was going to be pork and leek stir-fry.

Well, that was until I saw the caterpillar, which had been hiding in the leek:



I did what everyone does in the circumstances:

1. shrieked
2. called the children for an impronto natural history lesson
3. decided to add it to the pot for extra protein
4. got out the camera

OK, maybe everyone doesn't do all of those - darn thing tried to make its' escape:



(I took it to the compost heap, along with the rest of the leek.)

Meme

Penny tagged me from a meme ages ago, and although I've had it written up for a while, I haven't posted it.

So here goes:

The Rules: Each player answers the five questions about themselves. At the end of the post, the player then tags 5-6 people and posts their names, then goes to their blogs and leaves them a comment, letting them know they’ve been tagged and asking them to read your blog. Let the person who tagged you know when you’ve posted your answer.

1. What I was doing 10 years ago:
Ten years ago I was pregnant with my last child and feeling overwhelmed.

2. What 5 things are on on my to-do list for today (not in any particular order):

• Write a blog post


• Ring up about car insurance


• Do lots of washing


• Cast on for an adipose baby


• Write the Scout Group minutes

3. Snacks I enjoy:
Cherry tomatoes, marmite crisps, pineapple, coffee and walnut cake.

4. Things I would do if I was a billionaire:
I posed this question to the family and Kiddo said she would write a will. After a little more reflection that she added that she would put the money in the bank. A child after my own heart, especially as I think she really would..

First I'd buy a big house, and install some staff to do the boring-but-necessary stuff - a cook/housekeeper, a gardener, some kind of tutor/governess/nanny/chauffeur, a secretary.

Then I would buy a building in the next village, the one with a main road running through it, and open a shop which sold yarns and fabric, to use as my own personal stash. There would be one or two managers (it makes sense for there to be one for the wool and one for the fabric). When new ranges came in, I'd put some aside for my own personal use, but if I changed my mind, they would go back into the shops main stock.

For my creative time, I would only make the things I wanted to, knowing that if they weren't of any use to my family or friends, I could put them into a rich person's charity raffle and the time taken to make them would not be undervalued.

Meanwhile I would buy as full a set of Robert Recorde's books as possible - he wrote the "Pathway to Knowledge", "Castle of Knowledge" etc. I would probably buy a copy of "Historia Piscium" (in English - "the History of Fishes"), which is a notorious book in the history of science. I'd really delve into some topic, researching and writing books about it. I'd follow Brian May's example and work on a PhD.

For charitable work, I would use some money to promote the study of science, right from primary school through to university level. It would probably be physics/astrophysics or chemistry which I concentrated on, but maths would be in there too.

Essay - all done

Well, I have at last finished my 2000 word essay on English Natural Philosophy 1660-1720. I hope my tutor doesn't mind that that I said there was "a confusing web" of ideas.

My creative impulse has been to make a XXXX for a swop, and until I know the swoppee has got it, I won't be posting about it.

I also gave a Greek geometry lesson to Kiddo's class during their Ancient Greek Day. That was fun, and they seemed impressed that you could draw an equalateral triangle using a ruler and compasses. I'm tempted by the idea of going into help with maths on a more regular basis...

It also gave me a chance to see what the other mums had done about costumes. Put it like this: Kiddo was the only Hoplite, but I saw a lot of bed-sheets.

I've started making water bottle carriers for our summer holiday. I ought to take some photos...

Just arrived...

What are they queued up for?

The latest Yarn Forward magazine:


It's mine, I tell you, mine!

Yarn Forward News

I'm feeling smug - I managed to post about the latest Yarn Forward news on Ravelry before anyone else, and the news isn't yet on the Yarn Forward blog. The news came out in an email sent out to subscribers.

We’ll be sending out a pdf press release throughout the day to major knitting retailers, designers and companies. We’ll also be posting on all the big forums, blogs and anywhere else that we can to spread the good news.

Impressions - Hyperbolic Crochet Reef

I was in the South Bank yesterday, with a few spare minutes to look at the Hyperbolic Crochet exhibition. I only had time to gather impressions rather then descriptions.

The dominant impression was of the soft velvety texture of the reefs made from thick chenille yarn, which longed for me to touch and stroke them. This contrasted greatly with the hard, defined, jewel-like reef made of seed beads, shut away behind protective glass.

The one structure that stood out was a knitted sea anemone.

It got me thinking. If I was alone in a room with a net guru and the hyperbolic crochet reef, would I use it to explain the database that was ravelry? What if I was too unimportant to have a name badge, and he was too important to need one?

A million ends

I haven't been able to show my knitting, because it is for a swop. A swop with the dealine for posting at the end of May. However I chose a very pretty pattern, without reading the Ravelry comments about it. One would have warned me "there are a lot of ends to sew in".

Part one of the pattern was simple but each repeat of part two took longer then I expected, and I could only do a limited number at a time

Actually I exaggerated in the title, there aren't a million. But there are about 100, (unless I've under-estimated) and I did the 36th today.

Messy Lives

When my parents were well and healthy they did things like knit multiple ponchos for my brother's bridesmaids, and did much pruning in our garden and travelled to Machu Picchu and met princes and former ambassadors. I talked proudly to the other mums about what they were doing at playgroup when I collected children. And my friends talked about the interesting things their parents did.

And then my parents got old and ill. And when they decided to move house, I had to travel for two hours (each way) to meet the estate agent and show them round the house. And then my mother went into hospital, and the move happened around my father, and I signed the things that had to be signed, and orgainsed the storage unit. And when I mumbled about this to my friends at the school gate, a different set of friends told me about the daft things their aged parents and parents-in-law were doing, and I realised that my parents were part of a different set of parents. Some people's parents might be climbing mountains, and talked about with pride by their grown-up children. Other people's parents found climbing stairs beyond them, and their grown-up children kept quiet.

And that is today's installment of messy Tuesday.

Wooly metaphors in seventeenth century science

I have a 2000 word essay to write about Descartes, which is one reason I haven't written anything here recently.

While researching it, I discovered that Pascal carried out experiments on a variety of things, including wine and wool. That led me into checking up about wool and experiments in the seventeenth century, and it seemed that wool - by which they meant fleece - was a useful metaphor for air. They were investigating about air pressure. We are used to thinking about air as having weight, but in the seventeenth century this was a matter of debate.

Torricelli compared a column of air to a cylinder filled by wool. When a weight is placed on the top, the wool is compressed. He said that if a knife was thrust through the cylinder, the wool-pressure is unchanged. Pascal pointed out that the weight of the wool itself compresses the wool at the bottom of the heap.

Boyle used the analogy in a different way, referring to wool that was being compressed. He states "upon the removal of the external pressure, by opening the hand more or less, the compressed wool doth, as it were, spontaneously expand ... till the fleece hath either regained its former dimensions", or at least as close to its dimensions as the "compressing hand... will permit".

Descartes too used a wooly analogy, but unfortunately his was wrong. Asked why mecury did not flow out of an inverted tube, he said that the air was like wool and "the ether in its pores to be like whirlwinds moving about in the wool." Everything was moving in a circle: there couldn't be a vacuum at the top, because Descartes thought vacuums were impossible.

Knitters versus the BBC

Or maybe that should be the BBC versus knitters.

If you hang around the same knitting groups I do, you'll have come across this Angel Knits thread, and this Ravelry one.

And now even the BBC itself is posting about it.

The BBC article does seem really quite fair from my understanding of the story: it refers to the "unscrupulous" other people who were using Mazzam's patterns. (I think their legal team have checked it very throughly.)

The essence of the story is that Mazzam created a pattern for knitted Adipose babies from the first episode of the current season of Dr Who and posted it on her website. Then someone started selling copies of the pattern on ebay, and I think Mazzam complained to ebay and the patterns were removed. After that the BBC got in touch with Mazzam etc etc. My guess is the ebay seller shopped her to the BBC, but who knows?

FWIW, the nice thing about Dr Who is that I always see the latest episode within 24 hours of its' first showing. I never need to worry about spoilers on the net, unlike almost every other sci-fi program I watch.