Off the Hook Astronomy

Steampunk Softies: Scientifically Minded Dolls From A Past That Never Was

2012-01-26T08:52:00.000-08:00

I first heard about the Steampunk genre several years ago, and though I can't remember my first introduction to it, I have found the Steampunk aesthetic fascinating. This portrayal of a past-that-never-was conjures up images of worn leather, top hats and monocles, victorian corsets and fans, aged brass buttons, and of course a really cool pair of aviation goggles. There's a certain sense of adventure that goes along with the Steampunk genre: along with its victorian sensibilities, it also depicts a future as H.G. Wells or Jules Verne would have envisioned it. Modern technology like computers are powered by steam, and pirates and explorers rule the skies in their zeppelin-like flying airships.

I suppose it was only natural, therefore, that when I randomly saw "Steampunk Softies: Scientifically Minded Dolls From A Past That Never Was" on Amazon, I just had to go for it. I was immediately intrigued, and also surprised that I had never heard of this book before, considering all the craft blogs I follow (though I suppose it only came out in 2011). This little book is definitely a treasure.

Steampunk Softies features patterns for 8 steampunk characters, each with their own intimidating list of materials. Before you even get started, however, the authors give you tips on cutting out the patterns, gluing, and aging fabrics, and also a reassurance that most of the detail pieces can be found in jewelry or hardware stores.

Each character has a little introduction, complete with their name and back story. One of my favourites is Geronimo Bore, pictured above, a prospector with a drill attached directly to his arm and who just can't resist the "glittery things you find in rocks". Though his drill arm and eye patch look complicated, they're constructed with such simple things as a screw, a button, an O-ring and some embroidery floss.

Another one of my favourites is Charity Storm, the dedicated aviatrix with her own set of wings. As with all the patterns, the list of materials is rather extensive (it takes up the whole left-hand column on the first page), but upon closer inspection, it's mostly stuff that most crafty types would have lying around anyway: a scrap of purple wool, a scrap of metallic lace, a couple of domed metal buttons... In addition, each step is illustrated, and a 360-degree view of each character is given. So despite everything, these softies are not as daunting a task to construct as it first appears.

I have yet to make anything from this book, but I'm definitely excited to (yeah, yeah... grad school). I'd probably start with the doctor Ferris Scapula (pictured on the cover in the top hat) because I think I already have most of the materials for him, but I'd love to make any one of these softies! In all, Steampunk Softies is a lovely little book, and definitely a great source of inspiration.

The Diatom Shawl

2012-01-20T20:20:00.000-08:00

For the first time in my life, I succumbed to buying one of the gorgeous knitting kits that Knit Picks has to offer. Somehow I had always thought that buying knitting kits (unless they're from awesome independent designers like Joanna) were a waste of time and creativity. I mean, if you're going to knit a pattern, shouldn't you have the freedom to choose which yarns you'll use? That's always half the fun for me.

But then... Then, my friends, I discovered the Diatom Shawl. When I first saw it in the Knit Picks catalogue I knew I had to make it, and, as it turns out, the neutral colour palette looked just perfect to me! The incredibly awesome nerdy story behind this shawl also appealed to me. Designer Kerin Dimeler-Laurence explains:

Any lady who uses the phrase "order of magnitude" is ok in my books. To paraphrase, her shawl design is based upon the diatom called the Arachnoidiscus, a cute little unicellular organism that looks something like this:

The resulting shawl is nothing short of gorgeous!

And it's huge! I didn't have enough blocking mats to accommodate its 5-foot diameter, so I used a curtain rod and a cleverly U-shaped blocking mat configuration to block the darn thing.

As Karin says, the knitting of the shawl isn't nearly as hard as it looks. I had trouble in the arrowhead lace section, but only because the pattern became so darn repetitive that I got really bored with it. Also, the fact that it started off with only 7 stitches and grew to 612 stitches by the end didn't help, especially when it took 45 minutes to complete a round near the end. Fortunately, those gorgeous colour changes near the end really helped me make it through the home stretch. The yarn is, of course,Knit Picks Palette, which is a nice solid fingering weight wool. It's lovely, but they gave me way too much of it with the kit, so now I have two and a half balls of the white yarn that I have no idea what to do with... Ah well, I could have worse problems!

Ok, I was wrong...

2012-01-17T20:00:00.000-08:00

I admit it! Ball winders (in combination with a good swift, of course) are AWESOME! For the longest time, I figured I was good enough at winding balls by hand that I would be just fine without a ball winder... but I was wrong. I mean, I can wind an entire skein of Cascade 220 into a nice little cake in under five minutes!

Let me slow down and backtrack a bit. For X-mas, my lovely mother gave me a Knit Picks ball winder. This one, to be exact:

I was a little dubious at first. "Will this really make winding my yarn into balls faster?" I asked myself. And of course, it did. I got this beautiful cake of yarn in just a few minutes:

Which is now a lovely centre-pull "ball" (if you can call something cylindrical a ball):

I thought it was so cool, I even made this ridiculous video with my ball winder and swift in action (yes, I'm a super nerd):

Flavour Zen Tastes

2012-01-16T16:09:00.000-08:00

The boyfriend has started a new blog! He's calling it Flavour Zen Tastes, and he's using it to write about his explorations in food. He recently acquired the taste for coffee and has been experimenting with adding interesting flavours to this drink with a local coffee shop owner Brian. He's also been writing about the delicious food we get to eat on a regular basis (yes, this is why I'm getting fat), such as this mouth-watering mustard-crusted trout:

You should go check it out!

The Annual X-mas Crafting Review (Part 2)

2012-01-13T23:53:00.000-08:00

Besides all the X-mas knitting I did this year, I also made a few things out of wire. For my friend Stevie, I made a snail...

This piece was created by twisting some 1.5mm aluminum wire into shape with pliers and then hammering it into place. I added a jump ring and then put it on a pleather cord (not pictured, unfortunately). This was surprisingly quick to make, and I'm quite happy with the design (which was actually conceived of by the boyfriend). I'd definitely use this design again for earrings or pendants... perhaps even to sell on Etsy eventually? I even made the clasp!

For my Mom, this year, in addition to those pretty knitted cuffs, I made a shawl pin:

I again used 1.5mm aluminum wire to make the basic shapes, then hammered them into place and attached them together with a thinner silvery wire (not sure of the material). My favourite detail is the vintage button attached in the centre there. I had been planning on putting a bead or something, but then inspiration hit and it just seemed to fit perfectly. It's one of the vintage buttons I picked up at the Creativ Festival this year.

I'm also a huge fan of the dangly bit at the end of the pin part. I used a Swarovski crystal and a teardrop-shaped glass crystal bead.

And of course the boyfriend insisted on showing off my work in the setting of his epic beard:

The Annual X-mas crafting review (Part 1)

2011-12-27T09:05:00.000-08:00

The Newtonmas presents have been handed out, the wrapping paper has been cleaned up, and the traditional holiday dinner (home-made pizza in our house!) has been eaten. That means that it's time to show the world what I made everyone for X-mas now that I don't have to be all secretive about it! This will likely be a very long post, so I'll start with the knitted gifts and save the rest for another post.

I'll start with the big one: this year, I knit my first man sweater. My dad expressed an interest in getting a hand-knit tennis sweater... you know, the v-neck cabled cardigans, usually white with a navy blue stripe around the collar? (Something like this.) It had to be a cardigan, because Dad gets hot easily. I couldn't seem to find a pattern I really liked that was free or in a book I already owned, so I designed my own! This is how it turned out:

I actually worked this sweater in pieces because I couldn't think of a good way to do it seamlessly at the time (though I thought of some later after I'd already started). Designing the sleeve caps and arm holes was interesting, since I decided to go with a set-in sleeve, but the sweater design section of Debbie Stoller's Superstar Knitting came in handy. There are a few elements I'm really proud of, as well. I'm a huge fan of these pockets, for example:

I'll probably post this technique as a tutorial on the Happy Seamstress at some point, but it's essentially an afterthought pocket with more forethought. Yeah... that makes sense. I'm also quite proud of the button band. I did a double-knit button band using this tutorial. The buttons I acquired whilst at the Buttons and Needlework Boutique in Victoria.

The oatmeal-coloured yarn is Diamond Yarn Galway Heather, an aran weight pure wool yarn that was very nice to work with (though it felts extremely easily). I have two balls left which might become a laptop case for the boyfriend. The red yarn is KnitPicks Wool of the Andes, which was gifted to me by Joanna. (Thanks a bunch, Joanna!) She had some left over from her cupcake kits.

Most importantly, Dad seems pretty happy with the sweater. The fit is good, and he's actually been wearing it since he got it, which is a good sign. Here he is, showing his approval:

The second hand-knit gift I made were these lovely soft cuffs for my Mom.

The pattern is Mrs Beeton by Brenda Dayne and the yarn is some stuff I got at the Knitty Yarn Round Table in September called Heaven's Hand Silke (pure silk, nom nom nom!) and the leftover Filatura Di Crosa Baby Kid Extra from the cowl I made Mom last X-mas. I used some iridescent purple beads from my bead stash. I really liked knitting this pattern... it's super cute, and pretty clever. And working with the Silke was amazing. I wish I had a bathtub of the stuff.

Here's a funny video I took while she was posing at the piano and didn't know I was filming:

The last yarny gift I made this year was this cute little teddy bear for my friends' baby:

I pretty much just made up the pattern as I went... and I'm not sure I entirely remember what I did, but it turned out awful cute, right? I used some yarn from Mom's stash and she also knit the little scarf. And of course, here's the mandatory cute baby picture, taken by her parents and not by me. She's very studious:

Next time I'll show pictures of the shinier presents I made. Stay tuned!

Jewelry for your knitting (or crocheting)

2011-12-23T13:09:00.000-08:00

Ah, the holidays! Endless hours of time wastage! At least that's what mine have been like so far. It's wonderful... Speaking of the holidays, my knitting group had their holiday party a couple of weeks ago. Besides eating way too much, drinking way too much, knitting a ridiculous blanket, and watching the rotisserie channel (yes, this is a real thing), we had a gift exchange! Since I can't bear the thought of facing the mall and going shopping this time of year, I used my crafty skills to make something: stitch markers!

I had decided that the necklace I made at the Creativ Festival was really not something I'd ever actually wear, so I took it apart. The components are really great, so I used some of the beads (Swarovski crystals!) and the leftover wire to make these, essentially just a head pin and a loop to slip onto your knitting needles.

I used the instructions from this website to make the spiral head pins, but I'm not sure I'm a huge fan. They don't sit as flat against the bead as I'd like them to.

I wasn't entirely sure who'd be receiving these stitch markers, and we do have some crocheters in the group, so I also made the above crochet stitch markers. I think they look kind of like earrings. My friend Alia was the lucky recipient of all these, and apparently she's really enjoying using them. Huzzah!

They love me! They really love me!

2011-12-20T19:27:00.000-08:00

Well, Lynn over at Sweet Little Stitches, who is a good friend of mind and a crocheter from my weekly knitting group, loves me. She gave me the Liebster Blog Award, which goes to a blog with fewer than 200 followers. The idea is that when you receive the award, you then pass it on to five other bloggers.

Thus, in the spirit of the award, here are five blogs that I really like to read, and are deserving of this award:

1) Jori Baldwin - Sketchbook, as you might have guessed from the name, is a collection of sketches made by my friend Jori, who is quite a talented illustrator. I have a few of her pieces adorning my apartment, this one and this one to be specific.

2) Cassandra's Tears is my mom's blog on which she posts short stories that she has written. I think she's pretty talented, though she doesn't post nearly often enough.

3) Chez Emilie is my friend Emilie's blog. I knew her when I was doing my undergraduate degree in Physics. She's pretty amazing... she has two beautiful daughters and a lovely husband (whom I also studied with), and on top of that, she does quantum physics! She mostly blogs about her adventures in sewing, which I think she's pretty awesome at.

4) Iris is not exactly a blog (though it does have a blogspot address), but I thought it deserved a shout-out anyway. It's a fantasy and science-fiction zine that a few of my Lennoxville friends contribute to (and edit and publish), and you should go read some of the stories right now.

5) Last but not least, Sneaky Milk is my friend Jenny's blog. She's a comedian and story-teller, and a very funny writer. Her blog is mostly just about her life in Toronto. She hasn't written much in a while, but hopefully that'll change.

Pay-It-Forward socks (or two down, two to go)

2011-12-15T12:10:00.000-08:00

I'm slowly working my way through the projects I agreed to do for that Pay-It-Forward thing. I finished these socks for Joanna back in September, but I guess I just never got around to blogging about about them. In exchange, Joanna made me some pretty sweet pants (which I unfortunately don't have pictures of).

These were made using the Ornamental pattern by Nuoska on Knitty. I love the heel construction best of all, I believe... that cable that goes around the back of the heel just looks so cool.

The yarn is Mary Maxim's Step It Up in the Oxford Blues colour-way. I actually quite like this yarn... it wasn't as soft as some sock yarns I've used, but the colours are lovely, and it gives quite a nice finished sock. The yardage is quite good too... with the leftover yarn, I was able to make a pair of short socks for myself.

I used the Bloody Socks pattern by Kimberly Dijkstra from Vampire Knits, though I made a couple of modifications. I did a short-row toe, and an afterthought heel because I didn't want to break up the colour changes on the top of the foot. I also added an extra 3 stitches to the lace pattern and to the bottom of the foot because my feet are a little wider. And, I tried to get the colour changes in the yarn to match up on both feet, but as you can see from the above picture, it didn't work. As Brenda Dayne once said, "This way lies madness."

Spinning straw into gold

2011-12-06T18:30:00.001-08:00

Or in this case, spinning clown barf into beautiful variegated yarn. While at the Creativ Festival this year, I picked up some roving from a huge grab bin that was really really colourful.

Actually, I mostly got it because I thought it would be hilarious to spin up some really weirdly colourful yarn, and I didn't think too much about how the spinning process would change the colours. As it turns out, the process of drafting it causes the colours to mix together in the most wonderful way, so what I got was a lovely gradual blend of colours. Here it is as a single ply:

And then when I plied it, my little skein of rainbow yarn became a thing of true beauty. All of the different colours melded together, and the strands change colour at a different rate. Come to think of it, it's probably the most evenly-spun yarn I've done to date...

I can hardly wait to see how it knits up!

Wine bottle cozy pattern

2011-12-03T16:15:00.001-08:00

It's been a little while since I've posted a free pattern, so here's something quick and easy for you. I whipped up these crocheted wine bottle cozies a few hours before some friends' wedding party to cover up a bottle of port and a bottle of homemade white wine which we were bringing as gifts. This is the label for the home-made wine, by the way:

The label says "Sam's Beard Estates WINE BITCHES!" Yeah... not totally family-appropriate, but we had a hoot making them. The reddish shape is the silhouette of the boyfriend's beard as seen from the side. If you stare at it, you might get it, but it's meant to be a little abstract.

Anyway, on to that pattern! I used two thirds of a leftover ball of Knit Picks Telemark for the purplish one, and then some mystery worsted weight for the white one. The grey yarn is Bernat Berella 4 Solids & Ragg, which is a worsted weight yarn, but I think you can probably use anything from sport weight to worsted for this pattern, since the double crochet is fairly stretchy.

Materials:

About 50 grams of a sport to worsted weight yarn
a 5mm crochet hook
a darning needle to sew in the ends

Gauge: Approximately 3 sts per inch, but it doesn't matter too much

Instructions:

Make magic ring (you can find a good tutorial here). Ch 3 (counts as 1st dc).

Rnd 1: Dc 11 sts into ring, sl st into 3rd chain. Pull ring tight. (12 sts)
Rnd 2: Ch 3, dc into sl st, * 2 dc in next st, rep from *, sl st into 3rd chain. (24 sts)
Rnd 3: Ch 3, dc into sl st, * 1 dc in next st, 2 dc in next st, rep from *, sl st into 3rd chain. (32 sts)
Rnd 4-10ish: Ch 3, dc around, sl st into 3rd chain. (until it extends to the beginning of the neck of the wine bottle)
Rnd 11: Ch 3, * dec 2 sts, 1 dc in next st, rep from *, sl st into 3rd chain. (24 sts)
Rnd 12: Ch 3, dc around, sl st into 3rd chain.
Rnd 13: Ch 4, * sk 1 st, 1 dc in next st, ch 1, rep from *, sl st into 3rd chain. This creates eyelets to pass the drawstring through.
Rnd 14: Ch 3, * dc into ch, dc into next dc, rep from *, sl st into 3rd chain.

Fasten off.

With a 12” piece of yarn, twist and fold in half so it twists up on itself, and tie knots at each end. Then draw through the eyelets. You can also use a crochet chain or an i-cord if you want.

You can do this in red, green, and white stripes for a very festive wine cozy, and it adds a nice personal touch to that bottle of wine you bring to a Christmas party. Enjoy!

Victorian Adventures!

2011-11-29T22:22:00.001-08:00

And no, I didn't time travel... I recently spent a few days in Victoria, BC to hear the premiere of my daddy's opera, Mary's Wedding. It was certainly a great success, and I don't think there was a dry eye in the audience. I bawled my eyes out during almost the entire second act... Anyway, while I was there, I managed to do a bit of sightseeing, and yes, of course, visit some of Victoria's wonderful yarn shops!

I know my priorities, so I'd like to first mention that Victoria's yarn shops are all wonderful. There are three in the downtown core (and they were within a 15-minute walk of our hotel!): the Button and Needlework Boutique (whose display my mom can be seen drooling over in the above picture), Knotty by Nature, and the Beehive Wool Shop. Our first stop, the Button and Needlework Boutique was extremely nice, and the ladies there were very very friendly. Also, they had a WALL OF BUTTONS! Mom and I were impressed...

I picked up a skein of a very lovely silk mohair blend called Shibui Knits Silk Cloud (a very apt name, let me tell you) in the wasabi colourway that I just couldn't stop petting...

The next day, we went to Knotty by Nature, which was even more fabulous, if that's possible, and certainly my favourite crafty stop on the trip. Most of the stuff in the store was local hand-dyed and hand-spun yarns, and they also had more roving than I've ever seen in one place. I seriously wanted to buy all of it. The nice fellow who worked there also offered to show us how he uses his drum carder to make amazing fibre blends... I totally need a drum carder now. The finished product totally looked like some sea god's beard, but it was so sparkly and soft and amazing...

I couldn't resist buying a little bundle of blended fibre from them.

The third and final yarn store we visited was the Beehive Wool Shop. It was very nice as well, though after the last two, it seemed kind of ordinary. They had a good selection of very nice yarns, but weren't any more special than any yarn store I could have gone to in Toronto. Even so, I managed to walk away with some very nice sock yarn (Diamond Yarn Luxury Collection Soxy) that was being sold at a very reasonable price. I know, I'm weak...

Besides indulging in all that yarny goodness, we saw a whole lot of Cowichan sweaters...

Had tea and biscuits at the Murchie's Tea store...

Gazed upon the beauty of the Victorian harbour...

And enjoyed some very good food, including this beautiful pumpkin spice latte...

It was a really great trip, and I would certainly visit Victoria again, given the chance. And now, if you're ever there, you'll know where to get your fibre fix!

No FO left behind...

2011-11-09T20:52:00.000-08:00

I'm currently in Victoria, B.C. for the premiere of my Dad's opera. I'll certainly write about the amazing time I'm having here when I get back home, but I felt like writing an entry right now... And then I realized that I have a bunch of finished objects that I never got around to writing about! So here goes...

The first on the list is this Swelligant Scarf (from Son of Stitch 'n Bitch) for my brother because he wanted to have a fancy scarf. I think I never posted about it because I was waiting to get some pictures of it on him, and that never actually happened. So, I apologize for the crummy picture. I used an acrylic/alpaca blend in a fingering weight, which might have been a little fine for this pattern, but it still turned out nicely. The pattern features a reversible cable, which is really neat, and so I'll likely make this pattern again in a heavier yarn (my mom is already on her second).

The second is my stripy shawl, which I made for the boyfriend's cousin's wedding, and never wrote about because I was waiting for pictures from other people of me wearing the shawl at said wedding and those pictures never materialized. I used the Dream Stripes pattern by Cailliau Berangere. It was originally written in French, and so the translation isn't amazing, but I was able to figure it out (and knowing how to speak french was a bonus). I used leftover yarn from my dad's Guitar Socks and the leftovers from my brother's scarf.

As you might have noticed, I kept running out of yarn, and so I probably redid the edging three or four times. I started off making it grey, but I didn't have enough yarn for that, and then I tried the white, but that didn't pan out either... And then I did the green, and I had enough yarn for all but the last two rows and the bind-off. I think it probably turned out ok regardless, and I wear this shawl all the time as a scarf. It's super cozy.

Next we have what I like to call my Boobie Cozy, though it's really just a cute little shrug. The pattern is the Minisweater by Stefanie Japel and I used four skeins of Debbie Bliss Pure Silk that were gifted to me by a friend. It was a dream to work with, but since that yarn was much thinner than the pattern called for, I had to do a few modifications. However, since it's essentially just a top-down raglan, it was pretty easy to figure out.

My favourite part is totally those moon-face buttons, though figuring out how to properly place them was a pain in the ass. I ended up making the first button-hole in the wrong place, and had to sew it up and do an afterthought button-hole. Unfortunately, the silk seems to have stretched a bit as well, so it's a little looser now than it was, but I still love it.

Finally, we have this super thick and awesome cowl, which I never posted about because I didn't bother to take nice pictures. I used the Marian pattern (only on Ravelry) by Jane Richmond and a skein of Cascade Magnum. I didn't have any 15mm circular needles, so I ended up knitting it flat and seaming it, which turned out just fine. I absolutely love how fast it worked up (only 2 days of on and off knitting), and how squishy the finished product is. I should knit with big yarn and big needles more often...

Anyway, that's about it for my forgotten FOs. Next I'll write about shiny new things!

Birthday jewelry

2011-11-07T06:37:00.000-08:00

As my second hammered wire jewelry project, I decided to make Joanna a necklace for her birthday.

The chain and magnetic clasp (not pictured) were bought at Madame Pickwick, a favourite craft store in my home town of Sherbrooke, QC, and the beads are from my very aged stash. Everything else, including the jump rings and eye pins, was fashioned from copper wire that I bought at Planet Bead in Milwaukee, WI. Here's an in-progress shot:

And just in case anyone is interested, this is what my workstation looks like when I'm playing with wire:

Going clockwise from the computer we have, well, Nikola, my new Macbook pro which adds music and video entertainment (on this occasion I was listening to CBC Radio 2), water for hydration, my bead stash (that I've had since I was a teenager), my flat-nosed pliers (with the blue and black handle), the world's smallest anvil, my round-nosed pliers (with the purple handle), my teeny tiny hammer, my side cutters (with the purple handle), my chain-nose pliers (with the white and blue handle), a crochet hook for making jump rings (I use this method), my needle-nose pliers (with the black handle), my work-in-progress, and my spool of wire.

All in all, I think Joanna liked her necklace. Here she is, showing it off on the special day:

The Creativ Festival and my incredible desire to become an alpaca farmer...

2011-10-28T07:34:00.000-07:00

Because really, who could resist this face!

Photo courtesy the Happy Seamstress.

That's Ozzie, the resident alpaca at the Spinning Wheel Alpacas booth. We are totally best friends forever.

Photo courtesy the Happy Seamstress.

Right, so Ozzie (a.k.a. the best alpaca ever) was one of the features at the Creativ Festival, which I just happened to go to this past Saturday with my friends Joanna and Lisa. I didn't go absolutely nuts on the purchases, which is sometimes a problem when presented with so much crafty awesomeness, but I attribute that mostly to having taken a Steampunk Wire-wrapping Jewelry class with June Beach in which I created this crazy thing:

My favourite part is the dangly steampunk button at the bottom. I must admit, however, that my wallet didn't escape the festival completely unscathed. I splurged on this gorgeous sparkly and super soft baby alpaca yarn:

I also picked up this absolutely gorgeous hand-carved shawl pin:

One booth was selling used crafting books (at least I think they were used) for very reasonable prices. I got Nicky Epstein's Knitting on the Edge for a mere $10.

I got a bunch of buttons and beads, some of which were free, and the rest of which were pretty cheap:

The best find of the day was this tin of buttons I got for $5 filled with these really cool vintage-style buttons, none of which I disliked (and you all know how rare that is when you have a random assortment of anything).

I really love those cameo ones...

And now I'm all inspired to make stuff! If only I didn't have that pesky PhD to worry about... sigh.

Crashing Comets into the Sun

2011-10-21T11:31:00.000-07:00

Here's a neat little tidbit: a video off NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD) showing a comet crashing into the Sun (or at least approaching it very closely and probably disintegrating) and the coronal mass ejection that follows...

Now, these two events are likely unrelated because comets are so small compared to the sun that they shouldn't have any effect on solar activity, so it's likely just a coincidence that these events occurred together. As Phil Plait from Bad Astronomy explains, the Sun is fairly active right now, with these coronal mass ejections happening all the time. It's also fairly common to see this special class of comets called "sungrazers" go very close to the Sun, sometimes crashing into it. So, if you have two events that are fairly common, chances are that eventually they'll happen at the same time.

Oh, and in case you were thinking that maybe we've finally seen real evidence of alien life, that flying saucer thing in the background is actually the planet Mercury... so no need to worry. You can read more about this event on the SOHO (SOlar and Heliospheric Observatory) website or on the Sungrazing Comets blog.

Playing with wire (or One Down, Three To Go)

2011-10-17T19:06:00.000-07:00

This here is my newest toy:

And this here is my newest obsession, the result of which is the first completed project from my Pay-It-Forward venture:

That's right, I've picked up yet another craft: hammered wire jewelry. I've done a fair bit of jewelry-making in the past (see here for some examples), but most of it has simply involved putting different elements together into an interesting completed object, not necessarily creating the elements that go into the finished project. The above is my first attempt at doing a bit of the latter, by bending wire into cool shapes and hammering it flat so it holds the cool shapes. I must admit that I was greatly influenced by some of the amazing artists on Etsy, especially Nicholas and Felice, who make the best ever shawl pins.

I started off my adventure with some simple sketching. I had the idea for the earrings first, and then I went on to make the necklace.

I learned a lot during the process of bending and smashing the wire. One of these things was that you shouldn't bang a piece of wire with beads on it... more likely than not, your beads will get smashed. I also learned that beads break easily if you try to force them onto a piece of wire that isn't straight. I think the most important lesson, however, was to look before you cut. To show off all my mistakes, here's my pile of failure:

Anyway, for a first attempt, I'm very happy with how they turned out. My mom, at least, who was the lucky recipient of this jewelry, seemed to like it, and now I've payed her back for the pretty dress she made me:

Here are some more pretty pretty pictures:

Astronomy Wednesday: Weather on failed stars

2011-10-12T12:36:00.000-07:00

I'm constantly amazed by the awesome things my colleagues are doing. It just goes to show that even graduate students can make really neat cutting edge discoveries in Astrophysics. The most recent star (haha... no pun intended) in our department is Jackie Radigan, a 5th-year PhD student working with Ray Jayawardhana. She studies weather on brown dwarfs, which are essentially failed stars, and has recently made some interesting discoveries, which you can read about here and here.

Artist rendering by Jon Lomberg

Brown dwarfs are astronomical objects that bridge the gap between massive gas giants, such as Jupiter, and the smallest stars. They range from about 13 to 80 times the mass of Jupiter, and though they form in the same way as regular stars, where big clouds of gas collapse under the force of gravity into spheres, they are too small to fuse hydrogen into helium. When they first form, they can be almost as bright as real stars, but as they age, the heat from their formation dissipates and they become fainter and fainter. Because brown dwarfs are so faint, they're extremely difficult to detect and so the first one was only discovered in 1988.

Image of Las Campanas Observatory stolen from Wikipedia

Several of these objects have been discovered since, using large all-sky surveys that explore light in the near-infrared such as 2MASS. Jackie herself has been using the DuPont 2.5-m telescope located at Las Campanas Observatory in the Atacama desert in Chile (pictured above). I'm a little bit envious that she gets to travel to this gorgeous location (since the furthest I've ever been sent on the school's dime is to Milwaukee for a conference... I should write about that sometime). Turns out that that this observatory is also where University of Toronto prof. Ian Shelton made the discovery of the famous Supernova 1987A. That's an interesting connection.

Image of Jupiter's surface stolen from NASA

Anyway, as she tells it, Jackie was sitting in the airport on her way to Chile when she got an email from one of her collaborators with a plot showing a 30% change in brightness over 8 hours of the brown dwarf 2MASS 2139, which is approximately 47 light-years away. This variation is about 10 times larger than one would expect from magnetic features such as sunspots. She and her collaborators think that this change is due to a huge storm on the surface of the brown dwarf that blocks out some of the light coming from the brown dwarf's surface, something like a supercharged version of Jupiter's Great Red Spot (pictured above). The change in brightness comes about as the brown dwarf rotates on its own axis. With more detailed observations, that is, with higher resolution and a broader frequency range, they'll be able to make sure that their model is correct.

It will be very interesting to see what sort of follow-up results Jackie and her collaborators come up with over the next several months. A paper about this research will be submitted to the Astrophysical Journal very soon, but you can read her preliminary article here.

The cutest octopus in the world

2011-10-03T13:27:00.000-07:00

Joanna, over at the Happy Seamstress, has been extremely busy making extremely adorable knitting patterns purely for our enjoyment. One of these is Octie. Here is an army of the friendly cephalopods that Joanna knit up herself:

This pattern is for sale as a pdf on the Happy Seamstress website (only $1.49! cheap!), but Joanna was also selling Octie kits at Fan Expo. They came in five colours of this very soft DK-weight superwash merino with different eye colours and more than enough stuffing. She also included knitting needles and a darning needle, so you really didn't need anything else to get started. And the kits just looked so perfect all lined up on the table.

The Happy Seamstress will be selling these kits at future craft fairs in the Toronto area, so stay tuned if want to pick one up! She also has some other super cute patterns up her sleeve, so watch out for those too.

As for my own version, I decided to forgo the button eyes and instead try out my brand new toy: a needle felting tool!

It turned out quite well, if I say so myself.

And Octie is also quite fond of sitting on my head.

P.S. All photos by Joanna.

Astronomy Friday: Faster than Light Neutrinos?

2011-09-30T14:15:00.000-07:00

The big thing in Physics news lately has been the results from the OPERA experiment which showed that these sub-atomic particles called neutrinos were travelling slightly faster than photons, the massless particles that light is made of, would have. This result is especially interesting because according to Einstein's theory of Relativity, nothing is supposed to be able to travel faster than the speed of light. You can read about these results all over the internet (here and here, for example), but the basic idea is that scientists at CERN shot some very high-energy neutrinos through the Alps and into a detector, which measures how long it took them to get there. What was found was that the neutrinos reached the detector 60 nanoseconds faster than they would have if they were traveling at the speed of light.

It might be useful to talk a bit about what neutrinos actually are. These weakly-interacting, neutral elementary particles were first proposed to exist by Wolfgang Pauli in the 1930s to help conserve energy and momentum in a process called beta decay, but weren't detected until 1956 in an experiment using beta-capture, where an anti-neutrino and proton combine to make a neutron and positron. Nowadays, we routinely detect neutrinos coming from the sun and from distant supernova explosions. This little particle was central to a scientific conundrum called the "Solar Neutrino Problem" where only about a third of the number of neutrinos expected to be coming from the sun were detected. This was solved by the discovery that neutrinos have mass (though a very small one), and come in three different types which they can oscillate between at random.

The layout of the OPERA experiment.

Since neutrinos are supposed to have mass, the results from the OPERA experiment are mildly disturbing. Relativity is founded on the principle that objects with mass cannot travel at the speed of light, much less faster than it, and if neutrinos can, in fact, travel faster than the speed of light, then we would have to seriously change all our ideas about spacetime and gravity. Fortunately, this is a very preliminary result, and there is a good chance that it's wrong. Not that the scientists performing the experiment were bad at their job or anything, but there are many sources of error that might pop up. As someone once said, "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." That means that physicists probably aren't going to take these results seriously until another experiment can verify them.

I'll certainly be keeping an eye on it... already there are a flurry of papers on the arXiv attempting to explain the OPERA results. If you want to read the original paper, check it out here.

What a beardo...

2011-09-17T16:09:00.000-07:00

Beards are the next big thing. Seriously, have you seen this shirt? The boyfriend actually has one so large he can hide small children in it (he was at "professorly" last time I checked). Believe me, I have serious beard envy. So, it only makes sense that The Happy Seamstress should design a pattern of one for those of us who aren't capable of growing our own. If you want to be a beardo, just like me, go check out The Happy Seamstress Beard Knitting Pattern.

It only made sense, of course, for me to take multiple silly pictures of myself wearing a beard. This one makes me look like Jesus:

And this one like a... well, I'm not quite sure, but aviators look pretty neat with a beard:

And here I look like a trucker with a, well, um, a fascinator? And cleavage?

If you want to see more pictures of weirdos in beardos, check out this blog post.

On a completely unrelated note, I think I'm gonna be a lumberjack for Halloween.

Fun things from the INTERNET!

2011-09-11T22:28:00.000-07:00

I love cake, and I love crafts, and when the two come together in a perfect sugary package, well, I just can't resist sharing the awesomeness with the rest of the world. If someone gave me this cake for my birthday, I think I'd probably fall in love with them instantly:

This one would be ok too:

To see more, check out Cake Wrecks.

As for other cool internetty things, one of my favourite all-time crafters, Debbie Stoller has posted some really cool and well-done knitting videos. The first one teaches the absolute beginner how to cast on and start knitting, and the other two talk about lace, one explaining the yarnover and the other how to do decreases.

If you want to get a detailed review, I wrote one over on the Happy Seamstress, and in the meantime, here's a screenshot to whet your appetite (I love that orange background!):

Astronomy Monday: Diamonds in the Sky

2011-09-05T18:00:00.000-07:00

Happy Labour Day, everyone! I thought I'd start off the week with some cool science because it's been a while since I've rambled on about astronomy here...

A couple of weeks ago, scientists announced that they had discovered a new millisecond pulsar with what is most likely the degenerate core of a star orbiting it. Since this newly discovered planet-like object probably has a mass close to Jupiter's but a radius closer to that of the Earth, it is extremely dense, and since it is most likely composed primarily of carbon, it would have a crystalline structure. In the media, of course, this is being announced with the sensational headline "Diamond planet found!"

The pulsar around which this planet is orbiting is called PSR J1719-1438, and it is a neutron star with a rotational period of 5.7 milliseconds. It's located in the constellation Serpens and is 4000 light years from us. A neutron star, of course, is the compact object that remains after a massive star goes supernova. As you might have guessed from their name, neutron stars are composed almost entirely of neutrons since the gravitational force of these objects have on themselves is stronger than the force keeping electrons and protons as separate particles (also called electron degeneracy pressure).

Neutron stars are often called "pulsars" because they emit regular bursts of light in the radio part of the spectrum. Since neutron stars used to be very large objects and were compressed into a small volume, they spin very quickly (hence "millisecond" pulsar) and have extremely large magnetic fields. Like supercharged northern lights, charged particles would be drawn in by the magnetic field and emit light as they speed up towards the magnetic poles (though this happens because of the interaction of these charged particles with our atmosphere on Earth). Just like with the Earth, the magnetic poles and axis of rotation aren't lined up, so as the neutron star rotates, the flash of light caused by these accelerating charged particles twirls around like a lighthouse. This is best shown in a diagram (stolen from the ATNF Pulsar Education page):

The interesting part about the PSR J1719-1438 system is that the "planet", which is called PSR J1719-1438b, is in fact believed to be the core of a dead star, which is certainly not how we usually think about planets being formed. Planets like those in our solar system were formed about the same time as the sun. The big cloud of gas out of which our sun was formed collapsed into a disk, and out of this disk gradually clumped together what would become the planets in our solar system. It would have looked something like this (from Astronomy Online):

What scientists think happened in this case, however, is that the PSR J1719-1438 system was originally a binary star system with one star large enough to go supernova and the other less massive. Because it would have burned through it's fuel more quickly, the more massive star would have died first and gone supernova, turning into the neutron star. The smaller star would have burned through its stellar fuel more slowly and as it started to turn into a red giant, its outer layers expanding as it finished burning hydrogen into helium and progressed to burning helium into carbon, the neutron star would start stripping material off its companion. The outer layers of hydrogen and helium would be torn away leaving only the dense core of carbon. In a slightly different situation, the smaller star might have been completely destroyed by the neutron star, but in this case, the tiny core was just far away enough (at 600,000 km, roughly the distance between the Earth and the Moon) and compact enough that it was able to survive.

Though this is a very exciting discovery, I have some, probably unfounded, issues with calling this object a planet. The official IAU definition of a planet is as follows:

"A "planet" is a celestial body that: (a) is in orbit around the Sun, (b) has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a hydrostatic equilibrium (nearly round) shape, and (c) has cleared the neighbourhood around its orbit.

Though all these criteria are probably true for PSR J1719-1438b, it seems strange to call something a planet which used to be a star.

At any rate, this is very cool science and I'm looking forward to seeing if more systems like this are discovered!

It's a Duck! It's a Bunny! No, it's a Duck-Bunny!

2011-09-02T12:44:00.000-07:00

I must admit it, I LOVE making toys, whether knitted or crocheted. There's just something wonderful about creating something absolutely adorable and seeing the personality of the toy grow under your fingertips. I don't even mind all the annoying sewing up bits so much. I also enjoy patterns that have a very clever construction, which is why I just HAD to make this adorable little toy.

Look! It's a bunny (though my grandma would argue that it looks more like a dog)!

However, just flip it around...

And it's a duck!

I actually made two of these little guys... one for my adorable 11-month-old cousin and another for my friend's baby. They both really liked their duck-bunnies, at least, that's how I'll interpret their promptly putting the toys in their mouths. I have a feeling their parents appreciated the cleverness of the pattern more than they did, but hopefully these toys will last long enough that the kids will be able to appreciate them for their construction.

The pattern is the Mini-Reversible Duck to Bunny by Susan B. Anderson. The original design was a little larger than what I ended up with, but I had a finer yarn and so used smaller needles. I used up some scrap acrylic yarn, some of which was from my maternal grandmother's stash, and embroidered the eyes to guard against little gnawing teeth. The heads are stuffed with cotton balls because that's what I had.

I'm a Red Hat Society Wanna-be

2011-08-18T12:46:00.000-07:00

Warning
by Jenny Joseph

When I am an old woman I shall wear purple
With a red hat which doesn't go, and doesn't suit me.
And I shall spend my pension on brandy and summer gloves
And satin sandals, and say we've no money for butter.
I shall sit down on the pavement when I'm tired
And gobble up samples in shops and press alarm bells
And run my stick along the public railings
And make up for the sobriety of my youth.
I shall go out in my slippers in the rain
And pick flowers in other people's gardens
And learn to spit.

You can wear terrible shirts and grow more fat
And eat three pounds of sausages at a go
Or only bread and pickle for a week
And hoard pens and pencils and beermats and things in boxes.

But now we must have clothes that keep us dry
And pay our rent and not swear in the street
And set a good example for the children.
We must have friends to dinner and read the papers.

But maybe I ought to practice a little now?
So people who know me are not too shocked and surprised
When suddenly I am old, and start to wear purple.

The Red Hat Society is a group that encourages women "to pursue fun, friendship, freedom, fulfillment of lifelong dreams and fitness". Essentially, it's a big social club for women, but also a support network. It was started in 1997 by Sue Cooper, who was inspired by the above poem to give her friend a red hat, along with a copy of the poem. Her friend liked it so much, that Sue was inspired to repeat the gift with several of her friends, and before she knew it, it became a worldwide club. The red-hatters distinguish themselves by going out in public with red hats and purple dresses and having way too much fun.

I'm not old enough to join the Red Hat Society (you have to be 50 or over to join), but until then, I can wear a ridiculous red hat of my own in their honour. My first felted project was this Foxy Felted Cloche (Ravelry link) by glitteratti. Unfelted, of course, it was HUGE, but after a good scrub in the sink with alternating hot and cold water, it shrunk up nicely (and filled my drain with wool fuzz). The yarn is Brown Sheep Lamb's Pride Worsted, which felts up really well.

To bling it up, I crocheted and felted the flower from this Lion Brand pattern and attached it to the hat with a brooch I found in my jewelry collection. I also edged it with ribbon I bought at Mokuba on Queen Street West here in Toronto. It's a store devoted entirely to ribbons and trim. Amazing.

This hat, however, is a testament to how long it takes me to finish things. It only took me a day to do the actual knitting, but then it was a month before I got around to felting it, and at least another month before I sewed the flower and ribbon on. I'll probably do another felted project someday, but I have to work on motivating myself to do the finishing steps after the knitting is done!

Double-knit Potholders: Now Officially a Wedding Tradition

2011-08-13T09:27:00.000-07:00

I recently returned from the Eastern Townships where some very awesome friends of mine got hitched. They did the deed in the most beautiful place on Earth, Baldwin Mills (I took some pictures last summer). I'm not joking. This is what I woke up to the day after the wedding:

The ceremony was beautiful (partly because I was asked to play violin at the last minute), the dinner was delicious (there was a whole roast lamb), the booze was plentiful (there was a bathtub of beer), and the party was incredibly fun. Those Baldwins sure do know how to get married. Anyway, as has become a tradition for me (see here, here, and here), I made the couple some double-knit potholders as a wedding present.

As usual, I tried to make the designs representative of the couple. The pixelated deer on the left is from the groom's now very successful game Sword & Sworcery. The mounted deer head on the right has become the couple's personal logo. They even used it on the wine bottles at the wedding.

If you feel like knitting Sword & Sworcery deer or Dead Deer potholders of your own, here are the charts for both designs (click for larger size):

Speaking of double-knitting, I've written a tutorial for making your own double-knit fabric over on the Happy Seamstress. You should check it out!

Lemon skewers

2011-08-09T20:34:00.000-07:00

I think it's become apparent that I am, indeed, a sock knitter. It was only a matter of time before I tried this fabled "magic-loop technique" for knitting socks toe-up, two at a time. And of course, I can never pass up a cleverly-constructed garment. So, when I saw the Skew pattern by Lana Holden from Knitty's Winter 2009 issue, I knew I was just going to have to knit it.

The construction is especially interesting because it's knit on a bias. This makes for a very cool-looking fabric, even more so when knit with a variegated yarn. I found, however, that this made modifying the sock to better fit my feet a bit more of a challenge, especially since I have wide feet, ankles and calves. In fact, I wanted to use up all of the yarn, so I made these mid-calf length, and figuring out the increases for the calves was super annoying. Even more annoying is the fact that they're still a little tight.

The yarn I used was Lion Brand's Sock-Ease, which I must admit I'm not entirely happy with. The colours are super fun, but it feels kind of scratchy, and even after a good washing, the socks are still a little itchy when I wear them. On the other hand, it does feel really sturdy.

I shouldn't sound like I totally don't like these socks though. The toe and heel construction totally baffled me at first, and I didn't really understand them until I was actually knitting them. It was one of those "just trust the pattern" instances. I had a wonderful Aha! moment when the heel magically folded into place. And the heel actually fits really well. It's nice and snug around the ankle where it might otherwise slip down my foot.

All in all, it's a very clever pattern that I'm glad I tried out, but that I probably won't work again.

Stitch 'n Pitch 2011

2011-07-21T08:06:00.001-07:00

Last night I went to the Stitch 'n Pitch with some of my knitting friends. It was an evening of overpriced beer and snacks, sweltering heat in the stadium (sticky legs on plastic chairs!), lots of knitters, lots of knitting (and a little crochet), knitting goody bags, and... oh yeah, I guess a baseball game was going on. The following picture, provided by SeekUp, pretty much sums it up:

I didn't bring my camera, but the pictures from last year's game are still fairly accurate, except we had a group of 7 knitters and one crocheter this year. The Jays beat the Seattle Mariners 11-6.

My Magnum Opus or The Cardigan That Almost Killed Me

2011-07-19T07:48:00.000-07:00

Sometimes you just need a project that tests every knitterly skill you have. A project that takes you months, and where you utter more curse-words than would be appropriate in polite company. A project that you know will look amazing in the end, but along the way makes you wonder if it's worth it... And oh, it's worth it. As Brenda Dayne puts it, it's your Magnum Opus.

Mine has been the Emma cardigan, designed by Janine Le Cras. It is easily the best thing I have ever knit.

It started off innocently enough, with 630 yards of the lightest yarn I've ever used, Fantastic Knitting Zephyr Laceweight. The top begun with a provisional cast-on and some eyelet lace... simple enough, but once I got to the lower lace portion... well, let's just say that that's when the cursing really started.

Each row is a lace row (knitted lace as opposed to lace knitting) with no plain purl row between, and the stitch count was at way over 200 stitches, and so it took me about an hour to complete each row. It was full of p2togtbls and other such stitches... but begrudgingly, I must admit that the result is well worth the trouble. Blocked, it became the drapiest, most beautiful piece of fabric I've ever created.

By the time I got to the sleeves, I was running dangerously low on yarn. Instead of the big puffy sleeves in the pattern, I went instead with capped sleeves finished with eyelets through which I put an elastic ribbon. These were achieved by picking up the same number of stitches as in the pattern and doing the same short-row shaping without the increases between the short rows. I also only had 32 stitches between the short rows. After knitting the edging around the neck and the button band, I had 0.4 grams of the yarn left, so it's probably a good thing that I didn't go any farther with the sleeves.

My one small regret is that I didn't quite make the upper portion of the cardigan long enough. I was hoping that I'd be able to use it to modestly cover my bosom when wearing a low-cut dress, but in order to have the ribbon go under my bust, I have to rearrange my bust so that there's major cleavage going on. Oh well, it's a flaw I can live with. Everything else about the cardigan I love... The buttons are perfect, I adore the capped sleeves and that lace... oh that lace...

Prize-Winning Lemon Poppy-Seed Muffins

2011-07-15T12:23:00.000-07:00

Every now and then I go through my picture folders and I find something I really should have blogged about ages ago. This morning, I found some photographs of some very tasty muffins I made way back in March for the department muffin competition. There were a lot of very delicious entries, including some fantastic zucchini muffins and even some bacon muffins. I opted for a sweeter flavour and went with a (then) recently-discovered recipe from Bittersweet: her Lemon Poppy-Seed Muffins.

I followed the recipe almost exactly, except I substituted non-vegan yogurt for the vegan kind because I couldn't find any in my supermarket. That's ok, I wouldn't even come close to calling myself a vegan. Anyway, I ended up winning! The muffins had a beautiful zesty flavour, and when I tasted the batter before baking, I could almost feel it sparkling on my tongue.

My favourite part was the sugary poppy-seed topping. It was sort of like icing on a cupcake (but healthier of course because it's a muffin). I think next time I might try it with orange flavouring instead of lemon... that'd be nice.

Astronomy Tuesday: Living in a Hologram

2011-06-28T20:50:00.000-07:00

It's been a while since I've written about astronomy, so I figured I should get back on it. I just got back from a public lecture given by Leonard Susskind of Stanford University which was this year's Sackler Public Lecture hosted by the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics (CITA). Susskind is one of the great living physicists, and is certainly one of the best public lecturers I have ever seen. He has a Feynman-esque quality to his talking, and it's not just the New York accent. The ideas he presented flowed beautifully into one another, and though all his diagrams were obviously created in MS Paint, I never once felt like I was missing the point.

His lecture this evening was about the Holographic Universe, which doesn't have anything to do with holograms like in Star Trek, but instead means that all the 3-dimensional information in the universe can be represented on a 2-dimensional surface, sort of like how the 2D surface of a hologram shows 3D features. (Image from Crispers Handmade Holographic Images page)

The story began with black holes, which are one of my favourite things to talk about (and are, in fact, the area of my research, which I might talk about someday). These objects are essentially points of infinite density that have an imaginary boundary called the "event horizon" which is the point beyond which even light cannot escape the gravitational field of the black hole. That is, you'd need to be traveling faster than the speed of light in order to escape its gravitational pull. Susskind used a nice analogy with fish and a whirlpool in a lake, where past the event horizon, it is impossible for the fish to swim fast enough to escape the whirlpool. The following diagram (taken from AnsweringGenenis.com, which is a pretty good article if you ignore the God stuff) shows the basic idea:

It got a little more complicated after that. One of the most fundamental laws of physics, he says, is that information cannot be lost to the Universe. Even when you delete a little piece of information off your hard drive, for example, that information is transformed into heat which goes out into the environment. The problem with this, however, is that when something falls into a black hole, all information about that object is lost to the outside world, since even the light from that object can't escape the black hole's event horizon.

The next issue has to do with entropy. Entropy is a quantity which more or less describes the amount of disorder in a system. In thermodynamics, it's officially defined as the "unavailability of a system's thermal energy for conversion into mechanical work" (Google Dictionary). A commonly-used example is gas in a box. If you have one side of a box that has a bunch of gas molecules in it, and the other side is a vacuum, and you remove the barrier, the gas will go from one side of the box to the other and eventually mix more or less evenly. (Diagram from Principia Cybernetica Net)

The idea is that it goes from a state of higher order, with the gas molecules on one side of the box, to a state of less order, with the gas molecules floating all around the box. With a black hole, however, you'd expect the disorder to decrease if some gas fell in past the event horizon because the gas would become part of the black hole, which can be described simply by the size of its event horizon. However, a very smart guy named Jacob Bekenstein used some fancy physics to show that black holes actually have very high entropy, and that it can, in fact, be explained by the following elegant formula:

I'm not going to explain the entire formula, but the important parts are the S on the left hand side and the A on the right hand side. The former represents entropy, and the latter represents the area of the event horizon of the black hole. This means that the entropy of the black hole is directly proportional to its area, and not its volume, as one might expect. It's a mapping of 3D information onto a 2D surface... Just like a hologram!

This still leaves the loss of information problem. However, Susskind and other people then used crazy kinds of string theory (like there's any other kind) to show that deformations on the surface of the event horizon could describe (if you could measure them) the properties of the matter that has fallen in to the black hole. So just like a hologram uses a 2D surface to encode information about 3D objects, the 2D surface of a black hole would encode the information about stuff that's fallen into it. (Image of a hologram from Wikipedia)

Susskind also said that you could think of the Universe the same way... that information within a certain volume can be encoded on the boundary of this volume. This is called the Holographic Principle. This means that the information contained within the Universe could be described by information encoded on its boundary, that is, its event horizon. Essentially, we're living in a hologram!

If you want to learn more about Leonard Susskind's work, he's written a couple of popular science books: The Cosmic Landscape, where he talks about string theory, and The Black Hole War, where he talks about information and matter falling into black holes. I haven't read either, but I have it on good authority that they're both really good, so go check them out!

Adventures in Kool-Aid Dying

2011-06-20T07:43:00.000-07:00

Ages ago, I was gifted a beautiful skein of Oberlyn Stella yarn, which is a gorgeous cashmere, alpaca, merino blend. The only problem with it was that it was so... white!

I can't remember exactly where I heard about Kool-Aid dying, but I used this Knitty article as my main source. I picked out a couple of packets of a pretty Kool-Aid colour, Ice Blue Raspberry Lemonade, and went at it.

Here's the yarn getting a nice bath before its dye-job:

And here it is in my microwave-safe dying dish:

I decided to go with the microwave method because it seemed quickest, but I had to leave it in there for about 5 or 6 rounds of 2-minute zaps with a couple of minutes resting time in between, so it might have been better to just leave it on the stove-top to boil. (Please excuse the messiness of my microwave. It might not have ever been cleaned.)

At the end, all the dye had been absorbed into the yarn... magic!

Here it is drying:

As it was drying it had a beautiful robin's egg blue colour:

That faded a little when it dried, though I'm still quite happy with the colour. If I had wanted a more saturated colour, I should have used 4 packets of Kool-Aid instead of 2. The article suggests 1 packet per ounce of yarn, and I had about 3.5 oz (or 100g). Anyway, here it is all skeined up next to the yarn I plan on using it with for the next project I'll knit, which will be this booby sweater:

The Perfect Baileys Oatmeal Cookies

2011-06-13T10:09:00.000-07:00

Photo courtesy The Happy Seamstress

This recipe is courtesy of the boyfriend, who is an awesome cook. This all started when we had a craving for cookies, but didn't have any eggs. We looked up some egg replacements on the Interwebs, but it seemed as though you could replace eggs with pretty much any liquid. I think we briefly considered milk as an option, but then the boyfriend came up with the much better idea of using Baileys instead. The result is nothing short of incredible.

The real key to making these cookies taste amazing is to cook them just long enough so that they're barely firm on the outside and incredibly chewy on the inside. To quote the boyfriend: "Don't fuck with the timing, 11 minutes is perfect and I will fight anyone who says otherwise. If you want a crispy cookie, find another recipe, this one is wasted on you."

So, without further ado, here's the recipe!

Perfect Baileys Oatmeal Cookies

1 1/4 C Brown sugar
3/4 C Butter
1 tsp Vanilla Extract
2 tbsp Baileys
1 C Flour
2 C Oatmeal
1 tsp Baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
1/2-3/4C Optional additives

Preheat oven to 350. Mix sugar & butter, add vanilla & Baileys and mix until well combined. Mix dry ingredients together and add to wet; combine to cookie dough consistancy. If too dry, add more Baileys of course! Spoon onto baking sheet, and cook for exactly 11 minutes for perfect chewy consistency. You can customize the recipe by adding desired amount of chocolate chips, dried cranberries or apricots (chopped), pistachios, almonds, soylent green, or walnuts.

EDIT - Here are some factual errors and important notes the boyfriend felt the need to point out:

1) Not any liquid works as an egg replacement. We gave up looking for egg replacements because vegans make the worst websites. Inspired, I developed an extreme sense of adventure leading to an alcohol related experiment.
2) Milk was not an option because it had chosen to transform itself into an intriguing form of blue cheese
3) The cookies are only firm on the outside after they cool down. You want to cook them until they are lightly golden brown 3mm from the edge.
4) Soylent green is an acquired taste that once acquired, works with everything. If you prefer, you can use vegetarian soylent green made from algae.
5) I'm serious about the timing. Don't fuck with it. Unless your oven temperature can't be controlled with accuracy. Then watch for 3), or experiment further. Don't be afraid to experiment, even the batch I burned was delicious.
6) Using the cookies as ice cream sandwiches is pretty much the nicest thing you can do for yourself or your loved ones. Details & pictures in a later blog post.
7) If you use artificial vanilla extract, margarine, or white sugar when you make this, don't tell people it was my recipe. Spend a few extra dollars, it is worth every penny.

Holy pop tab dragons, Batman!

2011-06-07T15:10:00.000-07:00

I've now accumulated enough pop tabs that I could probably make something really rad with them. I was thinking, maybe a bag, or a top hat or even a corset... so I looked to Google Images for inspiration, and came across this:

Yes, this amazing dragon sculpture is made entirely of pop tabs and glue. This seriously impressive work of art, entitled Shinkonryuu, was made by OniMushaKid on Deviantart. My mind is blown.

Chainmail and wire crochet earrings

2011-05-25T20:18:00.000-07:00

I've recently become enamored with chain-mail jewelry (especially after making that jewelry for my mom), and recently, after being inspired by some earrings from this etsy shop that are no longer for sale, I decided to give it a another go.

With the exception of the ear wires, I just used material from my beading stash, and the whole thing took me less than an hour, so they weren't much of an investment all things considered. The ear wires are pure silver, the bead is glass, I think, and the wire and jump rings are silver plated. The hardest part was making the loop for the bead wire.

This next set of earrings was a little more difficult, but only because crocheting wire is an act of pure masochism. Well, it's not that bad, but also not for the faint of heart.

I used the thinnest wire I had with a 2.5mm crochet hook and made my own jump rings with slightly thicker wire. The join in the jump rings isn't as tight as I'd like, so I'm thinking it might be worth investing in a soldering iron. I'm not sure what the construction of the wire is, but the thinnest wire certainly isn't gold because it's already oxidizing a bit. I guess I'll have to invest in higher quality materials too.

I'm toying with the idea of maybe opening my own etsy shop, but we'll have to see. I certainly plan on making more of this jewelry!

More finished objects

2011-05-16T18:51:00.000-07:00

Gosh, it's been a while! Please forgive me for my sporadic posting... All I can say is that I've been busy with school.

Pay-It-Forward update: Thanks to everyone who commented on my Pay-It-Forward post. I will be giving awesome hand-made gifts to Tas (who has an awesomely named blog), Eleanor (my mom), Ellie (a fellow grad student in Toronto), and The Happy Seamstress (my partner in crafty crime). If you still want to participate, there's still room for one more comment, so feel free to leave one.

Now on to the interesting stuff! I've actually been quite crafty of late, though you'd never know it from my lack of posting. I'll go over my latest finished objects in more or less chronological order. Warning: some of these date back to January... Eep!

First on the list is another Baby Surprise Jacket, the legendary pattern by Elizabeth Zimmerman. I knit this one out of S.R. Kertzer On Your Toes, which is quite a lovely yarn to work with. This one took me a little longer than the last one (a full week instead of 4 days), but I certainly enjoyed it just as much. This pattern is strangely addictive. I knit this for little Eleanora, the beautiful daughter of my friends who got married a couple of Halloweens ago.

Next up is a pair of mittens for me! This is the Chevalier pattern by Mari Muinonen. I used a couple of skeins of Misti Alpaca Merino Worsted, which is a wonderfully soft yarn, though there were several cuts in the plies of the yarn in the balls I got. That was annoying, but I managed to hide most of the errant strands. Even though I did fewer repeats than were called for in the pattern (because I have very small hands) I still ended up running out of yarn when I got to the tip of the thumbs. You can see from the photo that I've got a different colour yarn there. I was pretty pissed at first, but now I kind of like how it looks. The boyfriend calls my "thumbs" when I wear them. I knit these using the magic loop method, which was ok, but I think I still like my double-pointed needles better.

I haven't given up on crochet either. I have a lot of dresses that leave very little to the imagination when it comes to cleavage, so I figured I should make myself a modesty panel. It's quite an ingenious design, the Lacy Cleavage Cover by Linda Z. O'Halloran. I used some good ol' Royale Crochet Thread which was probably a little thinner than the pattern called for, but I managed to make it wide enough with a little improvisational edging.

I'm a pretty big fan of the fastening mechanism for this thing. It attaches to my bra with those little elastics.

Next on this lengthy list of finished objects is an awesome pair of socks for my friend Daphne. She requested a pair of thick, comfy socks, and when I asked her what colour she'd like me to make them, she simply said, "Oh, I don't know. Make them wild!" And so I did. I used a skein of Bernat Satin and some random scrap yarn for the stripes, and I knit them using a generic short-row toe-up pattern. I made my first attempt at knitting one sock inside the other on double-pointed needles by first creating two short-row toes and then putting one inside the other and continuing with the double-knitting outlined in that awesome Knitty tutorial. I'm pretty happy with the result (and so is Daphne), though my gauge was a little looser than I usually like for socks.

Last but not least is this wonderful little tote bag, which I made using Elisa's Nest Tote by Purl Soho. I wasn't entirely satisfied with the seaming in this pattern last time I made it, and I was looking for a slightly sturdier bottom, so I decided to make it a crochet/knitting hybrid. The bottom was crocheted in the round in double-crochet and increased to 80 stitches, which I then picked up with my circular needle and knit in the round in pattern. I therefore didn't have to bind off before doing the applied i-cord edging. The latter caused the opening of the bag to be a little tight, but I can live with that.

Well, that's about it for now, folks! Let's hope my next entry appears a little sooner than a month from now.

Pay It Forward

2011-04-12T13:41:00.000-07:00

The Happy Seamstress is currently participating in Pay It Forward 2011, a fun little game where you get to receive and give hand-made gifts. Since I like both these things, I figured I'd hop on board!

The rules are as follows: I will make a handmade gift for the first five people who comment on this blog post as long as they promise to blog about this and send a gift to the first five people who comment on their blog post.

If you want to participate, simply leave a comment on this post with a link to your blog post. If you're one of the first five people to comment, you'll receive an extra-special handmade gift from me before the year is through. I'll be emailing you to get your mailing address so please leave your email with your comment.

If you're not one of the first five commenters, feel free to participate anyway! If nothing else, this is certainly a good way to spread the joy of craftiness.

Big socks, small socks, short socks, long socks

2011-03-21T16:06:00.000-07:00

One of the major advantages of having small feet is that knitting socks for myself tends to take much less time than it does for the larger male friends of mine. This became very apparent earlier this year, when I knit a pair of socks for the boyfriend that took about 6 weeks and a pair of socks for myself that took less less than 2 weeks. Mind you, the socks for myself were stockinette knee socks and the ones for the boyfriend were covered in mock cables, but that's besides the point. The boyfriend's socks are much more interesting, so I'll talk about those first.

Ever since I showed him June Oshiro's DNA cable scarf pattern, the boyfriend has wanted me to make him a pair of DNA socks (since he doesn't really wear scarves). It took me a while to get around to it, but I started the first one during the X-mas holidays and managed to finish at the beginning of last month. The wait was totally worth it, apparently, because he wears them regularly (which is more than I can say for some of the things I've knit for him... sigh).

I decided to go the toe-up route because I'd already tried it with those X-mas socks, and as I said then, I'm not going back to top-downers. I cast on 40 stitches (for a total circumference of 80 stitches), so that the central cable would take up one quarter of the total stitches, and so I'd have an even number to do 2x2 ribbing with mock cables on each side. I even made the second sock have the mirror image of the cable pattern so that they would be symmetric. When I got passed the heel, I continued the mock cable pattern all the way around the leg, but I had to finagle something in the back of the sock, with a 2x2 cable and an increase of two purl stitches, because it was no longer symmetric. I finished off with a 1x1 rib and Jeny's Surprisingly Stretchy Bind-off, which worked great. The yarn is something called bbbperCALZE, which I picked up at the Creativ Festival in October and deemed manly enough for boyfriend socks.

The socks I most recently knit for myself were infinitely simpler. I more or less followed the Knee Socks! pattern by Diana Parrington, with a short row toe and heel. I did the calf increases as indicated, and finished off with the super-stretchy bind-off again. Being simple stockinette, I was able to get passed the heel turn in the first day (mind you, I was sitting through talks at a conference all day), and the rest of it came together in about 12 days.

The yarn is a couple of skeins of Diamond Yarn Luxury Collection Fancy Free that I managed to pick up in the bargain basement of Romni Wools for cheap. It's a merino-alpaca-nylon blend that is just so soft and wonderful... and the colours are pretty awesome too. I love how the calf increases caused the yarn to pool differently along the leg of the socks. I'm calling them my Lightning Socks because of the yellowish pooling pattern on the blue and because of how little time they took. These are definitely my favourite socks right now, and I'm itching to make myself another pair!

Happy Belated Pi Day!

2011-03-19T13:15:00.000-07:00

Every year (or at least, every year since I moved to Toronto) I celebrate Pi Day, the semi-official holiday commemorating the mathematical constant pi, on March 14th (3/14, get it?). According to the Wikipedia page, it was invented by Larry Shaw in 1988 and was first celebrated at the San Francisco Exploratorium. There are many ways to celebrate, including contests to see who can recite the most digits of pi, or pi day jeopardy, but we generally just eat a lot of pie and drink a lot of mathematically-themed cocktails.

My friend Greg brought a pi cake, which wasn't a pie, but since it was a mint chocolate chip ice cream cake, and he totally confused the guy at Baskin-Robbins by asking him to put the greek letter pi on the cake, we forgave him.

We made pi day cocktails with pi cubes.

Almost everyone brought a pie, and they all happened to be different flavours! Win!

All photos courtesy the Happy Seamstress.

I wrote a tutorial!

2011-03-04T06:22:00.000-08:00

That's right, I know stuff that you should know too, and so you should check out my new tutorial at the Happy Seamstress! It's basically just a simple way to pick up dropped stitches without a crochet hook. My mom probably showed me how to do this when I first learned to knit, and it finally seeped into my brain far enough that I felt I had to share it with the world. As a fun preview, here's my attempt at a video (using my new Gorillapod!):

Yeah, I sort of screwed up at the end there. That'll teach me to make a swatch with a stiffer yarn. Anyway, if you want the more serious, probably easier to understand version, you really should check out the Happy Seamstress.

Speaking of the Happy Seamstress, you might recall that contest I mentioned a while back, you know, the one where you could submit a picture and story of a project you made (or were inspired by) one of the Stitch 'n Bitch books. Well, the contest is now closed, but you could still win a prize! If you vote for an entry by leaving a comment, then you have a chance of being randomly picked to also receive a free copy of Superstar Knitting. Not bad, if you ask me. So go vote!

The even more overdue X-mas knitting post, part 2

2011-02-26T13:46:00.000-08:00

I mentioned last time that I overcame my fear of stranded colourwork with those Spidey Socks. Well, as part of my X-mas knitting, I also overcame my fear extremely fuzzy silk-mohair blends (à la Cracksilk Haze). For my mom, I knit Romi Hill's Ice Queen from Knitty. I didn't use Rowan's Kidsilk Haze, but a slightly cheaper similar yarn called Filatura Di Crosa Baby Kid Extra in a gorgeous silvery grey colour.

I love this pattern. It's so simple, just a feather and fan kind of design, but it works so well with this yarn. And fuzzy mohair blends are just made for knitting with sparkly little beads. I used some little shiny purple ones from my bead stash. It ended up stretching out a little more than I'd hoped for, but Mom still likes it, so it's ok.

The beads I used for the Ice Queen, I also used for my second attempt at chainmail jewelry. I made Mom a nice necklace to match the earrings I made her last summer.

I used the basic rosette from the Chandelier earring pattern in the Anticraft book and then attached them together using these beaded wire thingies. I think the hardest part was making all the loops for the wires, since opening and closing jump rings is pretty easy after a while.

Finally, for my Dad, I made an iPod cozy... Yeah, it seems like I copped out a bit on that one. However, I also got him Sean Carroll's awesome new book, From Eternity to Here, which hopefully makes up for the lack of hand-made gifts.

I used "The BEST iPhone cozy EVER" pattern by bethanye. It's really simple, but works perfectly. I love the little pocket, to which I added a little button for extra security. I also made it a drawstring pouch. I used the left-over yarn from Stevie's socks.

I've actually been doing a LOT of knitting recently, and making a slight dent in my stash, so the lack of posting hasn't been for want of things to write about... I've just been incredibly busy. Hopefully, over the next week or so, I'll be able to catch up on my most recent FOs!

The long overdue X-mas knitting post, part 1

2011-02-08T14:49:00.001-08:00

Yes, I know. It's February. I should have posted about what I knitted for everyone's Christmas/Brumalia/Newtonmas presents at least a month ago... Well, better late than never, right? Right?

I'd like to start off with socks. I like socks. A lot. They're pretty much the perfect project. Simple enough to work on while watching TV or sitting through a lecture, yet small enough to be portable, and with that heel-turning in the middle they have just enough of a challenge to keep me interested. And after inheriting a drawer-full of hand-knit socks from my grandmother, I know the awesome squishy comfortableness of wearing them.

This X-mas, I tried my first toe-up socks and ohmygod I'm so not turning back. I love the short-row toe because I always manage to do my Kitchener stitch too tight. And of course, you can try it on as you go, and knit until you run out of yarn. I also tackled my life-long (ok, maybe a few months-long) fear of doing serious stranded colourwork. I'm still not a fan, but at least I can say I tried it.

Sing it with me! Spidey Socks! Spidey Socks! Friendly neighbourhood Spidey Socks! These are totally the coolest thing ever, by the way. The pattern is Even Big Guys Love Spidey Socks by Terri Frid (Ravelry link) and I made it for my brother. It was quite a challenge for me because I wanted to make sure the floats wouldn't catch on bro's toes, so I ended up twisting the yarns together every two or three stitches. It's a work of art, I tell ya... I wish I'd taken a picture of the insides.

Also, then ended up being a little long in the foot for the bro, mostly because I took his shoe size and based the sock size on that without actually measuring his foot. Well, I'll know for next time and he said he'd wear them anyway. And hey, they might shrink a bit in the wash! Then again, the yarn I used is mostly Knit Picks Stroll, which is superwash merino, and likely won't shrink... sigh...

So you're probably wondering what that thing between bro's Spidey Sock-clad feet is. Well, I'll diverge a little from the sock topic to tell you that it's just the most awesome beer cozy ever! It's the Booby Coozy by Keesha Arthur. I made mine an ebony-skinned Amazonian, not only because that was the only yarn colour I happened to have on hand, but because I thought it would look cool against the yellow bikini.

Warning! The following image is not work-appropriate! Teeheehee!

Ok, back to socks.

For my friend Stevie, I also made a pair of toe-up socks and didn't ask for his proper foot measurements and made socks that were way too big. Ah well, he promised to wear them as well. I made them from a lot of left-over yarns I had lying around. I used the left-over Stroll from the Spidey Socks for the blue, and an unknown gift yarn for the brown, and then some leftover red from my Monkey Socks and green from a new ball of S.R. Kertzer On Your Toes.

And that's a long enough post for now... next time, the parentals!

Happy Seamstress launch!

2011-02-06T07:37:00.000-08:00

I'm a little late on the uptake here, since Joanna actually relaunched the Happy Seamstress a couple of weeks ago, but I've been busy writing my first first-authored paper, so cut me some slack. Anyway, the Happy Seamstress site looks amazing. My favourite part of the site redesign is actually the pink bubble with the site logo... there's just something about that bright pink colour...

The site currently has some sewing patterns and one knitting pattern, some beautiful lace opera gloves (seen left), but more will be there soon. She already a few great free tutorials worth checking out.

Also worth checking out is our Stitch 'n Bitch contest! Following my review of the latest SnB book, Knitting Superstar, the publisher agreed to send out free copies to winners. The idea is to submit a photo and description of a project you've made from one of the SnB books, or a project that was inspired by these books. It doesn't have to be a project made recently or anything, but it does have to be your own work. If you knit or crochet and have ever used any of the SnB books, you should definitely have a look at the contest page!

Keeping our internet reasonably priced

2011-01-31T14:53:00.000-08:00

I'm not usually one to get all riled up about things, but when it comes to my internet, I don't mess around. The CRTC has made a decision which will pave the way to allowing internet service providers (ISPs) to charge Canadians per byte for their internet usage, sort of like what mobile companies already do. This means that we'll be paying a lot more for a lot less internet. To boot, the big telecom companies are forcing small companies to adopt the same billing policy, effectively eliminating any sort of cheaper alternative.

My internet is expensive enough, and I have no interest in paying more for it. If you're of the same opinion, and are Canadian, I hope you'll fill out the below petition. If for some reason that doesn't work, you can use the OpenMedia form.

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In other news, I just got back from an awesome conference in Milwaukee, which I will tell you all about soon with pictures and everything!

Astronomy Tuesday: Elusive Habitable Planets

2011-01-18T18:55:00.000-08:00

I know I said that I'd have lots of time to write about astronomy over the holidays, but really, I got so caught up in watching Farscape, reading webcomics and practising extreme relaxation, that I totally forgot. And then the semester started again and I got busy. Why am I writing right now? Well, my friend, it has to do with that procrastination/amount of work to do correlation.

Anyway, today I thought I'd talk about Gliese 581 g, an unconfirmed rocky planet orbiting the red dwarf star Gliese 581. The planet got everyone excited back in September since it was discovered in the habitable zone of its sun, that is, that perfect distance from the star where water can exist in liquid form. This would be the first time a planet outside our solar system has been discovered in that special region around its sun. Here is an image of the Gliese solar system compared to our own (from Wikipedia):

We shouldn't, however, start packing our bags to go visit this extrasolar planet. Besides the fact that interstellar travel is currently just a pipe dream, Gliese 581 g probably wouldn't be as hospitable as one might first think. Even though it's considerably closer to its sun than the Earth is to our own sun, Gliese 581 is much less massive than the Sun and therefore much less luminous. Thus, the average temperature on this planet is about 37 degrees (Celsius) colder than on Earth. It's possible that since it's 3 to 4 times as massive as the Earth, it would be able to sustain a thicker atmosphere with an increased greenhouse effect, but that's pure speculation at this point.

The other issue is that since the planet is so close to its sun, about one tenth the distance that Earth is from our sun, there's a good chance that it's tidally locked, that is, its rotation has slowed so much that one side of the planet is always facing the sun. This would imply that it would be incredibly hot on the side of the planet facing the star and very very cold on the side facing away from the star. This happens when the gravitational gradient, that is the difference in gravitational force which decreases with distance from the massive object (the star in this case), is large it exerts a torque on the planet which causes its rotation to slow down, eventually causing it to rotate at the same rate as it's orbiting the star. This is probably best described in a diagram (from Wikipedia, of course):

I don't know how much that really helped, but the point is, if there is a large difference in temperatures on the planet, it would be more difficult for liquid water to form, and therefore for life to exist. This problem might be solved if the atmosphere of this planet is thick enough to distribute the heat around the planet. Venus, for example, is also almost tidally locked to the Sun and because of its thick atmosphere, the temperature is more or less uniform on all sides. However, since our instruments still aren't good enough to be able to detect the atmospheric composition of Gliese 581 g, it's hard to say anything more on this subject.

The story is further complicated by the recent announcement by another research group that they aren't able to detect the new planet in another data set. The planet was discovered using 122 measurements from the HIRES instrument on the Keck 1 telescope in Hawaii, and 119 measurements from the HARPS spectrograph at La Silla Observatory in Chile taken over 11 and 4.3 years respectively. All the planets in that system (there are 6 in total) were discovered using the radial velocity technique, which I briefly described in a previous post. Basically, the planets all cause the star to wobble slightly in its orbit, and by subtracting the wobbles of the closer and more massive planets, one is able to detect the fainter signals from the other planets in the system. Let's take another look at that wobble (if only because I love animated gifs):

So this other group added 60 data points onto the HARPS measurements and says that they can't find the signal for Gliese 581 g. It has something to do with the error bars on the previous measurements, and assumptions that are made about the shape of the orbits of the planets in the system. On one side of the argument, you have astronomers saying that this new planet doesn't exist at all, and on the other side, the astronomers who originally detected it maintain that you need the data sets from both instruments to be able to see it.

At any rate, it will be interesting to see how the argument is settled, which I suppose will happen in the next year or so when even more measurements are taken. If this planet does indeed exist, it's certainly an exciting prospect for discovering life elsewhere in the universe!

Who-oa! You're like a gorilla!

2011-01-16T20:53:00.000-08:00

Yes, I have had the song by the Mopes stuck in my head for the last month or so, but more importantly, I got a GorillaPod!

It's an awesome little tripod with flexible legs and rubbery feet that wrap around and grip things like nobody's business. It had no trouble hanging on to my bookcase:

Or on to Spock, the stuffed beagle:

When my camera is attached, it also vaguely reminds me of those weird alien transporters from War of the Worlds. Especially when it decides to attack my face:

My plan is to use this newfangled contraption to take pictures and videos of my hands so that I can make tutorials and stuff without having to worry about holding the camera. Look ma! No hands!

On a completely unrelated note, I wrote a book review! You should go check it out on that other blog I now write for.

Books books books...

2011-01-10T08:44:00.000-08:00

I'm not very good at making New Year's resolutions. I mean, I guess some years I half-heartedly make a list, and then completely ignore it. This year, however, inspired by an ever-growing pile of books to read, whose prosperity has certainly been helped along by a large number of books received as X-mas presents from the parents and the boyfriend, I've resolved to spend a lot more time reading for pleasure.

Since I started grad school, I've read innumerable scientific papers, but I've hardly read any novels at all. Like maybe 2 whole books in the last 2 and a half years. Pretty pathetic. Well, that's not strictly true. I have been downloading audiobooks from Librivox, and I got through 5 or 6 books that way, and I have been reading a bit on my Kindle. However, I wouldn't say that either of those media really count as true books, since I'm either being read to or don't have to lug a real book around.

Anyway, to show I mean business here, in no particular order, is my reading list for 2011:

I'm in the process of reading the second book in Robertson Davies' Cornish Trilogy, entitled What's Bred in the Bone. I received these books as a birthday present, I think, at least 2 years ago, and have only read the first book, which took me about a year. It's actually a pretty interesting story, mostly taking place in Toronto, centered around the life of Francis Cornish, an eccentric art collector.

Next, I'd like to read The Earthsea Quartet by Ursula Leguin. This is a classic of fantasy literature, considered by some to be on a par with Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. Interestingly enough, I first heard about it from an audio recording of a lecture entitled "TMS Rings, Swords, and Monsters: Exploring Fantasy Literature" by Prof. Michael D.C. Drout which was given to me by Stevie ages ago. I then borrowed the books from my mom last winter break, and they've been sitting on my shelf collecting dust ever since.

The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution by Richard Dawkins should be a good read. I got this as an X-mas present from my dad last year. The boyfriend has read it, and he rather liked it, so I probably will too. It essentially debunks Creationism, etc. by listing all the evidence that has been found for evolution. If you read my post about the Creationist publication of Darwin's Origin of Species, then you already know how I feel about that subject. I also really enjoy Dawkins' style of writing. He's a very angry person, it seems, but he has very well-structured arguments. I listened to an audiobook version of The God Delusion, and I enjoyed it a lot.

The boyfriend got me this book, The Grand Design by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow, for X-mas this year. It's Hawking's first book in over 10 years, and covers all the really big questions about the origin of the universe and so on. I really enjoyed A Brief History of Time and Black Holes and Baby Universes, so hopefully this'll be good too!

I hope I don't get sick of popular science books at this point because The Universe and the Teacup by K.C. Cole looks like an interesting one. I got this from my dad for X-mas this year. From what I can tell, it's about how mathematics enable us to create patterns out of natural phenomena and thus explain them. Sounds like it's right up my alley.

The boyfriend also gave me for X-mas The Drunkard's Walk by Leonard Mlodinow, who also co-authored Stephen Hawking's most recent book. Apparently it's about randomness and how people are unable to account for this in their everyday lives. I'm a huge fan of chaos theory and randomness (Chaos by James Gleick was awesome), so this should be a good read.

Finally, for X-mas last year, I think, my dad gave me Daniel Levitin's This Is Your Brain On Music. It explains how all humans are experts in music, even if they don't know it, that is, the human brain is naturally programmed to understand musical concepts intuitively.

So that's my list... hopefully I'll be able to finish all these books by the end of the year, but I won't hold my breath. Still, a worthy challenge!

Lillian Gang: Apr. 11, 1919 - Nov. 27, 2010

2011-01-03T10:30:00.000-08:00

For this 150th post, and as we usher in a new year, I'd like to talk about my maternal grandmother.

The above picture shows her blowing out the candles at her 90th birthday about a year and a half ago. On Saturday, November 27th, around 1am, she passed away quietly in her sleep, having suffered a heart attack about a week earlier that left her weak and barely conscious. She lasted just long enough for my uncle from Israel to see her alive, though at that point, I doubt there was much of her mind left.

She did live a very full life, having traveled the world, raised three children, gotten her Master's degree while still a full-time mom, worked full-time as a social worker and then as a volunteer after her retirement, and lived in her own house until two and a half years ago despite my grandfather having passed away over 10 years ago. The obituaries that appeared in the Globe and Mail and in the Toronto Star hardly seem to do it justice.

Savta, as I always called her, was born Rochelle Leah Goldstick to parents Edna and Edward Goldstick, both immigrants to Toronto from different parts of Europe to escape jewish persecution. She was an only child, and always resented this fact. Her mother was over-protective and her father was never satisfied with any of her accomplishments. As her dementia progressed over the last couple of years, she brought up these early years more and more often, since her childhood memories seemed more vivid than those formed more recently. She would tell again and again the stories of how she and her cousin Wilfred would walk all the way to High Park, much to the dismay of both their mothers, and how she was constantly compared to her cousin Shifra, who would always do better than her in school.

She got her bachelor's degree in Social Work at the University of Toronto and worked for many years for the Toronto Catholic Children's Aid Society. She had the difficult job of taking children away from neglectful parents, but from what I hear, she was pretty good at it. She was always very tough. In the early '70s, she got her master's degree for purely financial reasons, since all these young people coming in with their graduate degrees were making more money than she was. It was right around this time that both her parents died.

She married my grandfather, Israel Gang, right after WWII in 1946. She and Grandad had a very weird relationship. I get the impression that they married because they were both getting older and were worried about finding a mate. I mean, they certainly seemed to love each other, and were married for 54 years before my grandfather died in 2000, but they did fight a lot. Grandad was a bit of a grumpy guy and had trouble expressing his emotions, and Savta knew how to push all his buttons. However, they played Scrabble together almost every day, and when Grandad died, she refused to play the game with any of us because it was too painful.

Savta was also an incredible knitter. She probably knit hundreds of sweaters and socks for herself and for everyone else in the family. My uncle, Savta's middle child, absolutely loved her hand-knit socks and would wear nothing else. When Savta couldn't knit any more because of her vision problems, my aunt taught herself to knit so that she could make socks for my uncle. I inherited her handknit socks, most of which are a single colour, and some others are striped because she ran out of yarn.

I miss my grandmother a lot. I regret not visiting more, and I wish I could have spent more time with her when she was still lucid. Little things set me off, like playing the Entertainer on the piano. She loved that piece, but when I played it for her she always told me I was doing the first part too fast. She was such a stubborn and independent woman, and it's hard to believe that anything could have done her in...

Happy Newtonmas to all!

2010-12-24T22:01:00.001-08:00

As I get older, I find it harder and harder to get into the holiday spirit. I've never been religious, so Christmas has never really had much meaning for me besides an excuse to get lots of presents. As a kid, presents were awesome, and I was always happy to get new toys, but now I find my material needs are much simpler... I'm not too interested in getting piles of presents anymore. I would even say that the excessive materialism attached to the various holidays people celebrate at this time of year bothers me a lot. For this reason, I've been looking for an alternative holiday to celebrate... something that better suites my beliefs.

My mom likes to celebrate Brumalia, which is the Roman festival that Christmas replaced. It honours Bacchus, so I guess you have to drink a lot of wine. It also takes place at the end of the festival of Saturnalia, so we put a cardboard cut-out of Saturn at the top of the Brumalia shrubbery like so:

I, however, subscribe to a much more scientific belief system, so an ancient roman holiday isn't quite the thing for me, no matter how much wine I drink. Therefore, this year I've decided to celebrate Newtonmas. Isaac Newton, considered by many to be the father of modern Physics, was born on Christmas day in 1642. There was some confusing stuff going on with dates back then, and so according to our modern calendar, his birthday is on January 4th, but since the calendar back then said it was December 25th, I think I'll stick with that one for the sake of the holiday.

Newton is most famous for discovering the Law of Gravitation by showing that the same force which causes objects to fall towards the ground also governs the motion of the planets around the sun. However, he is also credited with inventing calculus (though Leibniz also gets credit for that), building the first reflecting telescope, discovering that light is made up of many different colours, and much more. He was also very religious and a practitioner of alchemy. He might also have been a bit of a jerk.

Anyway, to properly celebrate Newtonmas, I will be doing the following:

Eating an apple
Singing some Newtonmas carols
Shining light through a prism to watch it split into a rainbow
Doing some calculus problems
Dropping stuff on the ground

Happy Newtonmas, everyone!

Astronomy Monday: The Solstice Eclipse

2010-12-21T04:33:00.000-08:00

Ok, so Astronomy Monday is one day late. I can pretend it's Monday if you will. In my defense, I was traveling yesterday.

Today I'd like to talk about this morning's solstice lunar eclipse. At least, I assume it was this morning since it was completely overcast in the Townships last night. I spent the whole day on the bus yesterday traveling from Toronto to the Townships to visit my parents for the holidays. The idea was that I would get back in time to watch the eclipse with my Dad, but alas, it was not to be. Ironically, it was perfectly clear in Toronto. Here's what it looked like there (stolen from blogTO):

Last night's eclipse took place between 1:33am and about 5am, with totality (that is, when the moon was completely covered by the Earth's shadow) starting at 2:41am and lasting 72 minutes. Though lunar eclipses are fairly common (I have been able to observe at least two of them in my short lifetime), this one was special because it occurred on the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year, something which last happened in 1638 and won't happen again until 2094. Fortunately, eclipses look the about the same no matter what the time of year, and the next one is on June 15th, 2011... Now if I can get my supervisor to send me to Australia, that'd be perfect.

As you may or may not know, a lunar eclipse happens when the Moon's orbit passes through the Earth's shadow, that is, when the Earth blocks the Sun's light from the Moon's point of view. This means that it's always a Full Moon when a lunar eclipse occurs (just like it's always a New Moon when a solar eclipse occurs). I always find a diagram is helpful (shamelessly stolen from Wikipedia):

Why then, you may ask, would we not have a lunar eclipse every time we have a Full Moon? This is because the Moon's orbit around the Earth is inclined by 5 degrees with respect to the Earth's orbit around the Sun, which means that the Moon's orbit only intersects the Earth's orbit in two locations. Only when we get a full Moon in one of these intersecting locations do we experience a lunar eclipse. This is probably also best illustrated by a diagram (from Starts With A Bang!):

As the moon travels through Earth's shadow, it looks like a progressively larger bite is being taken out of it, until the moon completely enters the umbra and turns this gorgeous shade of red. And why does the moon turn red instead of just going black? Well, folks, it's the same principle behind the question of why the sky is blue and why sunsets are red. As the sun's light passes through the Earth's atmosphere, the blue part of the spectrum is scattered, while the red part remains unaffected. Thus, the redder parts of the sun's spectrum are refracted by the Earth's atmosphere and the moon looks red. Because of this, the redness of the moon during an eclipse can depend on the atmospheric conditions on Earth, ranging from a bright orange to almost black.

The last lunar eclipse I saw was in February, 2008. It was a perfectly clear and freezing night, and the Bishop's Observatory was open to the public. My toes were completely numb by the time totality was finished, but it was still an incredible experience. If you want to know more about the mechanics of lunar eclipses, there's a really neat animated explanation here.

Sheepy Awesomeness

2010-12-15T22:39:00.000-08:00

Brenda Dayne blogged about this about a year and a half ago, but I thought it was worth a re-posting. Behold! Shepherds being awesome!

BRAIIIIIIIIIIIINS!!!

2010-12-13T20:49:00.000-08:00

Sorry guys. No Astronomy Monday today. I've got a stupid cold and I'm feeling the crunch from a paper deadline. Yes, there's too much astronomy in my real life for me to write about astronomy in my blog. Don't worry though... Holidays are coming up, and I'll be able to write about cool stuff in space to my heart's content next week.

As a consolation prize, please accept this goofy picture of one of my (more or less) recent projects:

His name is Slurpee, and as you might have guessed (if you're a fan of Futurama), he's a brain slug. The pattern is Brain Slugs by Alicia Ramirez, and this is the one time I actually used the yarn recommended by the pattern... completely by accident too. He was supposed to be the boyfriend's Halloween costume, but of course, the boyfriend forgot him at home when the big day arrived. Poor Slurpee. Oh well, at least he got one big night on the town.

The sweater that wanted to be a One-Week sweater...

2010-12-12T11:56:00.000-08:00

... but instead ended up taking three weeks to make, which, to be fair, is still a pretty short time to make a sweater in, at least for me. I started making the Three-week sweater when my mom came down for a visit about a month ago because I had her Christmas present on the needles, and so couldn't work on that. Also, I've been meaning to make this sweater since before I even learned to knit.

The sweater is Painted Lady by Jenifer Paulousky from the Anticraft. It's a top-down raglan crop-top with thumb holes, and I think it was that last feature which attracted me to the pattern more than anything else. When I was in high school, all my friends had hoodies that had thumb holes. For some reason, I never bothered to go shopping for one (and they were probably out of my teenage budget anyway), so I did without thumb holes with envy in my heart. But heck, now I knit, so I can make thumb holes in all my sweaters if I want!

My sweater started its life as four skeins of Malabrigo Merino Worsted Yarn that was given to me by a friend who was clearing out her stash (I've gotten some of my best yarns that way). It's absolutely delightful, both to knit with and to wear! The labels had disappeared by the time I inherited the yarn, and I'm fairly sure that one of the skeins was from a different dye lot, but I didn't care so much. Seriously... if you can get your hands on some of this, it's so soft and squishy and warm and wonderful...

Anyway, onto the sweater. I followed the pattern for a medium until I got to the underarms, where I tried it on... it was kind of baggy, and I worried that the ribbing would float around under my bust instead of clinging to my ribs, so I decreased a few times, which seemed to do the trick, knit the ribbing and bound off the body. This whole process took me six days, and I figured I could finish the sleeves in another day or two.

Turns out sleeves are boring because they took another week by themselves. I knit them using the magic loop method to knit both at the same time, and finished off the cuff and thumb holes with double-pointed needles. And of course, accidentally knit one of the thumb holes backwards the first time, but that was easy enough to rip back and fix. I should note that I used a smaller needle size for the different ribbings because apparently that makes them look better (and I guess it did).

I wore the sweater to school and upon asking what people thought, some said it would look better as a full-length sweater, and others thought it looked fine as is. The tipping point was probably that both my mom and the boyfriend thought it looked silly as a crop top. So, upon the advice of a friend, I just undid the bind-off and continued the ribbing until the sweater was about hip-length. This was also the point when I ran out of yarn... convenient! Seriously, I had to pull around the bound-off stitches so that I'd have enough yarn to bind off the last two or three stitches. I think they call that knitting on fumes.

In the end, I'm very happy with this sweater. Even if it wasn't as quick as I had hoped, I'm very pleased with the modifications I made, and this was worth taking a little extra time. I must say, the ribbed body is much more flattering than a crop-top and to tell the truth, my tummy did get cold when wearing it at the shorter length. After having worn it for about a week now, the malabrigo is pilling a lot, but I think this is a price I'm willing to pay for such a soft, warm sweater!

Spreading my influence

2010-12-08T07:07:00.000-08:00

My awesome friend Joanna over at the Happy Seamstress has honoured me with the task of occasionally writing in her blog. You can read my first introductory post here. I plan on writing about knitting and crochet, with the occasional free pattern or tutorial, or whatever else craft-related that strikes my fancy. Good things have already come from this, since I've been asked to review the new Stitch 'n Bitch book, which involves getting a complimentary review copy! Woo!

Joanna will be using the Happy Seamstress website to eventually sell sewing patterns. She's an awesome freelance designer, and a really talented knitter to boot. A little while ago, she was featured all over the internet for this amazing Super Mario sweater vest she made for her husband. It's seriously epic.

Anyway, you should check out the Happy Seamstress blog if you just can't get enough of me (I know, I know...) or if you want to see what other awesome things Joanna has come up with.

Astronomy Monday: Rethinking the Structure of Life

2010-12-06T22:31:00.000-08:00

The big thing in science news last week was the NASA announcement that a micro-organism has been discovered that uses arsenic instead of phosphorus in its cell components. That is, it uses arsenic instead of phosphorus in its DNA, in proteins that transport energy throughout the cell, and in the phospholipids that form the cell's outer membrane.

These little guys are bacteria found in Mono Lake, a very alkaline lake with large amounts of dissolved arsenic in Eastern California, and have the complicated name GFAJ-1. They look something like this:

Well, that's neat, you might say, but why is it really all that important?

The primary ingredients that make up life are carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, sulphur and phosphorus. All life that we knew of on Earth (until very recently), absolutely had to have these elements in order to exist. Life-forms have been found which substitute the trace elements necessary for life, such as certain types of molluscs substituting copper for iron as an oxygen-carrier, but these six primary elements were always present.

The fact that these bacteria are able to use arsenic instead of phosphorus means that it is possible that any one of the six major elements could be substituted for something else, and that life might be more ubiquitous and in much stranger forms than previously thought. When astronomers look for traces of life on extrasolar planets, which is made possible by observing the light of the planet as it transits in front of its host star, they'll have to consider more than just traces of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, sulphur and phosphorus.

How, you might ask, would it be possible for life-forms to substitute one element for another? Doesn't each element have unique qualities? Well, the answer to this question lies in the Periodic Table of the Elements (image shamelessly stolen from the BBC):

You might have noticed that arsenic, denoted as "As" is in the same column as phosphorus, denoted "P". As it turns out, elements in the same column in the periodic table have similar properties because they have the same number of valence electrons, that is, the same number of electrons in their outermost shell. Elements that have the same number of valence electrons can form similar bonds with other atoms. This is also why science fiction writers have been thinking for years about silicon-based life forms, because silicon is in the same column on the periodic table as carbon, and thus can form chemical bonds in a similar way.

Anyway, this is a far cry from finding life on other planets, but it certainly alters our perception of what can be used for the basic building blocks of life. You can find the Science Express article about these really cool bacteria here.

Edit (Dec. 7, 2010): CBC News announced today that University of British Columbia Prof. Rosie Redfield blogged that the methods used to determine that these bacteria use arsenic instead of phosphorus were sloppy at best, and that the results might not be correct. I'm looking forward to finding out how the pans out and to seeing what the scientific community comes up with!

Sunspots and Falcons

2010-12-01T07:02:00.000-08:00

On Monday, my friend (whom I shall call N) and I gave an astronomy tour to a small group of grade 5 and 6 students from a local elementary school. We started off with a planetarium show, which, amid cries of "Let's fly to Saturn!" and "Oooh! Can you zoom in on that again?", I tried to keep within 45 minutes. Needless to say, our planetarium super rocks.

We then went up to our observatory, where we were able to see the sun through our 8-inch telescope with a solar filter. We actually got to see sunspots, which was pretty impressive... It looked something like this (courtesy SpaceWeather.com):

After all the kiddies had thanked us and left, N and I decided that since we were already on the roof, we may as well hang out on the building's balcony for a while. The balcony looks like this:

As we turned the corner, we both stopped dead in our tracks. Right in front of us, sitting on the edge of the railing, was a really big bird, which I'm pretty sure was a peregrine falcon. We managed to sneak towards it, hiding behind the short columns on the balcony until we were within a few meters of it. At that point, it decided it'd had enough of us and casually jumped off the ledge to fly away. N managed to get some decent pictures with his iPhone:

(Who knows why that last picture looks so strange? I guess we'll say it's impressionist and call it a day.)

Astronomy Monday: Looking for light from the end of the Dark Ages

2010-11-29T09:24:00.000-08:00

My friend and colleague Greg has the coolest thesis topic ever. He used to be my office mate and we had the same supervisor for our first graduate research projects. I was doing a numerical project, which involved running simulations of dark matter particles clustering and doing lots of statistics on their power spectra... maybe another story for another day. Anyway, most of my work was done sitting at a computer in my office, running code. Greg, on the other hand, was smart enough to choose the observational project, which would land him several free trips to India.

To understand Greg's project, I guess we should first go over a brief history of the universe, which began 13.7 billion years ago. In the beginning, and for the first few hundred thousand years, the universe was filled with a hot dense plasma, that is, a gaseous state where the electrons are separated from the nuclei in most of the atoms. In this state, light couldn't travel very far because the photons were easily scattered by all the free electrons. As the universe expanded, it eventually became cool enough for the free electrons to recombine with their atoms, and all the light that had been bouncing around between these electrons was allowed to escape. We call this light, now red-shifted to the microwave part of the electromagnetic spectrum, the Cosmic Microwave Background.

For a while after this, the universe was pretty boring. For a few hundred million years, it was filled with this neutral hydrogen gas, which slowly started to clump together into what would become the first structures in the universe. Astronomers like to call this time the "dark ages" because there was no new light being produced. Eventually, the first stars formed from the collapse of hydrogen gas and there was again a source of photons in the universe. This new source of energy caused all the neutral hydrogen gas to again become ionized, and the electrons were once again separated from their nuclei, but now, since the universe had expanded and cooled considerably, light could travel long distances without being scattered. We call this the Epoch of Reionization.

Here's a pretty picture, shamelessly stolen from Wikipedia (and before that from the WMAP site, I think), which nicely illustrates this history of the universe:

My friend Greg is actually trying to observe this transition, to basically get a picture of the universe as it changed from neutral hydrogen to ionized hydrogen. But how, you may ask, would you be able to distinguish this neutral gas from its ionized counterpart? Well, it turns out that it's very difficult and necessitates the exploitation of quantum mechanics.

Neutral hydrogen is made up of an electron orbiting around a proton nucleus. These subatomic particles have something called "spin", which has to do with their angular momentum. When the spins of the electron and proton are aligned, the atom is in a slightly higher energy state than when they are anti-aligned. Thus, there is a very small probability (something like 0.000000000000003 times per second) that the electron will change its spin, and give off a low-energy photon. Here's a picture illustrating this from Hyperphysics (where you can also find out more details about this transition):

Even though this transition is extremely unlikely for a single atom, when you get a big bunch of neutral hydrogen together, it happens quite often. The emission of 21-cm radiation from neutral hydrogen gas has helped us map out this gas in our galaxy and in other galaxies. And Greg is looking for the 21-cm emission from the neutral hydrogen at reionization as it started to change into ionized gas, a process that would have happened gradually, in clumps around the first stars. Computer simulations seem to indicate that it would look something like this, where the ionized gas is indicated in orange, and the neutral gas in green:

Now, this 21-cm radiation is visible to radio telescopes, which is why Greg got to go to India... He went to the GMRT (Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope) array, near Pune, which is the largest radio dish array for metre-wavelength range of radiation. He keeps telling me that India isn't so great, but when I see pictures like this (taken in the middle of winter, no less), I can't help but be a little envious:

A lot of his time there has been spent looking for radio interference on the ground, caused by transformers, power line junctions, and loose wires in contact with power lines, and finding these means spending a lot of time wandering around in a farmer's field with a goofy-looking radio-wave receiver:

Unfortunately, the 21-cm signature of reionization is still much fainter than the foreground sources from the ground and in space, and so Greg hasn't been able to detect it yet. He did, however put some upper limits on its power spectrum, which you can read all about in his most recent paper!

P.S. Pictures from India provided by Greg himself.

More astronomy, less... hooks?

2010-11-22T19:53:00.000-08:00

I really enjoyed writing about that astronomy colloquium the other day, so I think I might write more about cool astronomy things here. Maybe I'll do an "Astronomy Monday" thing or something, though that isn't nearly as alliterative as I'd like. Anyway, today is still Monday (for a little while), so this will hopefully be the first of many sciencey posts.

On Thursday, November 18th, astronomers reported in Science Express that they had found the first extra-solar planet, called HIP 13044 B, that originated outside of the Milky Way galaxy. It's actually part of our galaxy now, but it originated in a galaxy that the Milky Way cannibalized, that is, ripped apart and absorbed.

Now, how can we possibly tell that this planet is of extra-galactic origin? Because of the great distances involved, the 500-something extrasolar planets discovered so far lie within a few hundred light-years of the Earth. (Though some people at UofT think they might have found a way to find planets in other galaxies.) However, the movement of HIP 13044, the star around which this planet revolves, seems to indicate that it's part of the Helmi Stream, a long string of stars which has been tidally distorted and pulled to form a loop around the galaxy. Numerical simulations and observations seem to indicate that each tidal stream around our galaxy used to be a dwarf galaxy or globular cluster that was pulled apart by the Milky Way. Here's a pretty artist's rendition of tidal streams from Wikipedia:

There are a couple of other peculiar things about this newly-discovered planet. The first is that the host star, HIP 13044, is extremely low metallicity, which means it contains very few heavy elements. In astronomy terms, heavy elements are any element heavier than helium, such as carbon, oxygen, up to iron. Anyway, this star has the lowest metallicity of any planet-bearing star discovered, at about 1% of the sun's metallicity. This is remarkable because the metals within a star are thought to be essential to the formation of planets, and this star having so little of them seems to challenge our knowledge of planet formation. Looky! A graph showing this star's metallicity compared to other stars that host planets:

The other peculiar thing is that the host star is in its red giant phase, which means that it has stopped fusing hydrogen into helium at its core, which causes it to become bloated and red. When the sun enters this phase, it will expand beyond Earth's orbit, totally destroying our planet. But don't worry, this won't happen for a few billion years. Here's a pretty picture of the life cycle of our sun from Wikipedia:

So if HIP 13044 is in its red giant phase, it might have engulfed other planets in the system that were closer in, and in fact, the higher than expected rotation rate of the star seems to indicate that this did indeed happen. In addition, it looks like the planet HIP 13044 B might be about to fall into the star itself as it enters its next phase of red giant expansion.

Finally, this planet was found using the radial velocity method of detection. In a nutshell, the presence of a planet around a star will cause it to wobble in its orbit. Because of the Doppler effect, as the star wobbles towards us, its light is slightly blue-shifted, and as it wobbles away from us, its light is slightly red-shifted. Here's a nice little animation, again from Wikipedia:

From the wobble of the star, we can tell that the planet has a mass at least 1.25 times that of Jupiter and an orbital period of 16.2 days. And it isn't Monday anymore. Darn.

A return(?) to potholder fame

2010-11-20T09:03:00.000-08:00

As you may recall, a few months ago, I posted that Star Trek Potholder pattern, and then the next day, I was super excited because I got almost 100 favourites and five comments on Ravelry in the first 24 hours it was up. The pattern, in case you're interested, is currently up to 57 projects, in 381 queues, and has been favourited 742 times.

Anyway, to further boost my already inflated ego, I was featured on CRAFT Magazine! You can find the post here with 37 (38 if you count contractions as two words) whole words extolling my awesomeness. Thanks for posting, Rachel Hobson!

Speaking of which, I still haven't made any double-knit potholders for myself. I should really get on that... maybe with Star Wars designs!

Taking pictures of stars

2010-11-19T15:08:00.000-08:00

Today was the Karl Kamper Memorial Lecture here in the ol' DAA, and one of the first astronomy talks in a while that has actually gotten me excited about astronomy. Prof. John D. Monnier of the University of Michigan gave a talk entitled "Imaging the Surfaces of Stars", where he described his involvement in using the Michigan Infrared Combiner (MIRC) of the CHARA Array on Mt. Wilson, CA to actually get an image of the surface of stars.

This is super cool because it's really really hard to take a picture of the surface of a star. As prof. Monnier explained, the size of a star compared to the distance between stars is about one to 5 million, and so to be able to resolve the disk of a star, your telescope would have to be able to resolve about 0.000001 degrees, or a few milliarcseconds. That's equivalent to being able to see a penny from about five hundred kilometres. The size of the telescope needed resolve even the closest star in visible light would have to be at least 40 meters across, which is bigger than any telescope built to date. (So whenever you look at any star through a telescope, it looks like a point of light, and not a resolved disk, and so isn't much more interesting than looking at it with the naked eye.)

Fortunately, prof. Monnier and his group are able to image stars through the magic of interferometry! This is basically combining the light from many small telescopes to make it seem like one big telescope. This is fairly easy to do with radio waves, but considerably harder to do with shorter wavelengths, like visible light. However, on Mount Wilson, they've managed to do this with an array of infrared telescopes, and have taken the image of the surfaces of several stars. Here's a picture of Altair they took in 2007:

Now, you may notice that Altair is not uniform in colour (and thus in temperature). This is because the rotation of the star causes it to be more flattened along its axis of rotation, and bulges around the equator. This means that the surface at the equator of the star is further from its core, and is therefore cooler at the equator than at the poles. (This is really an over-simplification, but the idea is essentially right.) Monnier's group has found that for very rapidly rotating stars, the temperature gradient between the equator and the poles can be several thousands of degrees, and that's where the trouble begins.

Why would this be a problem, you may ask? Well, astronomers like to classify stars by their temperature, and when the difference in temperatures on the surface of a star is larger than the classification temperature range, this makes their lives very difficult. And knowing the actual temperature of a star is very important for, say, placing it on the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram:

Prof. Monnier also talked about his work in imaging the star Epsilon Aurigae. This is a very special object because every 27 years, it is eclipsed by something. It was postulated that there was some sort of compact object in a binary orbit with the star that has a large dusty disk, and whenever this disk would pass in front of the star, the star's light would be blocked. Sean Carroll wrote a really long blog entry about it a few months ago, so I won't go into too much detail. The really cool thing is that in 2009, Monnier's group was actually able to image this dusty disk passing in front of Epsilon Aurigae.

There were also a few other things that I can't remember off the top of my head right now, and obviously I didn't take notes because I was busy knitting. Observational astronomy and stellar astrophysics aren't really my thing, but when cool stuff like this is going on, it's hard not to get excited!

My very own Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

2010-11-14T10:19:00.000-08:00

So, I didn't actually acquire the fictitious encyclopedia from Douglas Adam's Trilogy in Five Parts, but I did buy myself a Kindle. However, with unlimited access to Wikipedia a lot of other websites (email, facebook, or anything with flash don't work so well), it's pretty close to being the electronic guide to the known universe. Good ol' XKCD illustrates it pretty well:

I haven't actually bought any of the Kindle books off Amazon yet, but so far, it's pretty damn amazing. I've loaded up a bunch of pdfs of my favourite knitting patterns, of ebooks I got off Project Gutenberg, and of scientific papers I use for my research. Also, I can access the internet all the time, from anywhere... for free. Take that, iPad!

Because I love it, and because everything I love must be wrapped in yarn, I had to make it a case. Also, the case had to be awesome. I thought I'd model it after the cases they sell on amazon specifically for the Kindle, with the fancy leather top cover and elastic holding it together. I had planned to make it double-knitted, with pockets that I could fit cardboard into to make it stiff... Anyway, I ended up with this monstrosity...

It just wasn't going to work... Discouraged, I went the simple route. I looked through the Harmony Guide "101 Stitches to Crochet" and found a neat checkerboard colourwork pattern. Of course, then I ran out of yarn three quarters of the way to completion, and had to continue in a different yarn, and figured I may as well change the stitch pattern as well.

And then I sewed in a zipper because zippers are cool.

I'm actually really happy with the result. It's sort of hip and quirky. The plan is to next stitch on the words "Don't Panic" in neon green. It'll be awesome.

Sometimes I just want to knit yards of stockinette...

2010-11-12T08:54:00.000-08:00

After the labour of love that was my beautifully cabled sweater, I wanted to knit another sweater, but I wasn't up to knitting anything incredibly impressive. I wanted something easy that would just fly off the needles with minimal finishing. What I ended up with was this:

The pattern is the Buttony Sweater by Katie Marcus, and it certainly fit the bill for simple, mindless knitting with minimal finishing, being a top-down raglan and all. It took me less than a month to knit, which is really fast for me. The main reason I picked it was because I found all these green buttons in my big bag of buttons that I got from Zellers, and I wanted to use them all in the same project. I picked a yarn, Knit Picks Swish Bulky in the Tidepool Heather colourway, to match the buttons and I bought as much as was recommended on the pattern's Ravelry page.

As you can see from the picture, I ran out of yarn before I could finish the sleeves. In fact, because I didn't feel like knitting back, I did the ribbing in some left-over Marble Chunky. I was a little disappointed by that, but I got over it. It's super comfy and warm. To make sure my arms don't get cold, I wear it with either my belladonna sleeves or the arm-warmers that go with my icelandic non-turtle-neck.

I followed the pattern pretty closely and didn't bother with waist shaping. The sleeves I knit two at a time, using the magic loop technique with a really long cable, which ensured that they would be the same length. I'm not entirely happy with how the button band looks, but I don't care enough to go back and change it. I really like the construction of the top-down raglan, and I'll definitely make another. I'm eyeing the Painted Lady pattern off the Anticraft website.

In other news, the X-mas knitting has begun! Therefore, I won't be posting much about things I'm working on now until after the big day, but fortunately, I have enough of a backlog of stuff I've been meaning to blog about, that I should be able to hold out until then. Woohoo!

More baby things!

2010-11-01T19:03:00.000-07:00

This is totally me right now:

I have a conference to go to on Friday, well, technically a meeting, and I'll be giving my very first talk in front of people who actually know what I'm talking about. We're supposed to have a practice talk session with my supervisor tomorrow afternoon, and I've finished... well, maybe the introduction slides. This is because I'm procrastinating. In fact, right now, I'm procrastinating from my procrastinating, since I got distracted from reading blogs on Google Reader to write this blog post. I sure hope my supervisor doesn't read this.

Anyway, I thought I'd take this opportunity to show y'all some baby things I made recently which I can now display proudly since the recipients have received them (yesh, I spreak the Engrish). First up, we have baby legwarmers!

I got the inspiration for these from Kelley Petkun's Knit Picks podcast (that lady is full of good ideas). The motivation behind baby legwarmers is that babies often wear these little onesies that are legless and their little legs might get cold. And the best part is that when you're changing the baby, you can leave them on!

I made these from a free ball of Patons Kroy Jacquards (in the colourway Cameo) that I got at the Stitch 'n Pitch, which means they're washable, and also adorable. I used the pattern Baby Leg Warmers by Erin Cowling over others, mostly because of the author's nickname. I made only one major change, which was to add increases for the thigh.

Next up, a baby-sized aviator cap!

I made this using some gifted Knit Picks Andean Silk in the Slate colourway, a highly inappropriate yarn for baby things, but I don't care. The little flower is crocheted out of some left over Noro from that baby surprise jacket I made. I used the Aviatrix baby hat pattern (Ravelry link only) by Justine Turner, which I am definitely going to do again in an adult size for myself (maybe in lime green?).

Finally, the world's saddest elephant:

I made this using some of the left-over Andean Silk, so it's super soft, but it's totally going to be ruined the first time it's washed. I used Cristina Bernardi Shiffman's Oliphaunt pattern, which has rather cryptic sewing up instructions, and thus I attribute my little guy's wonkiness to this fact. Of course, I also did the pattern in stockinette instead of garter stitch, which may have also contributed to the wonkiness. Whatever. He's cute.

And a bonus shot of my cousin's baby (who all the above things were for) wearing her handknit booties!

D'aw! Ok, now back to writing my talk... ahem...

Knitting Guru

2010-10-14T11:05:00.001-07:00

Image credit: Kaspareks

I feel like the enlightened master of yarn and pointy sticks. Call me the Knitting Yoda. (By the way, I just did an image search for a picture of Yoda knitting... none to be found. I will have to change this.) The reason I feel this way is because last night, I gave my first real knitting lesson.

The girlfriend of one of my colleagues, whom I shall call S, expressed an interest in learning how to knit after seeing my beautiful cabled sweater, and last night, we got together for an informal dinner and a knitting lesson. I found out that the real reason she wanted to learn was because my colleague has a really nice hand-knit scarf from an ex-girlfriend, and S wants to knit him one to replace it and/or so she can steal the old one.

Anyway, S was a very quick learner. She had bought some straight aluminium needles and some gorgeous red Manos Del Uruguay Maxima. I first taught her how to hold the needles and make a slip knot, and then how to do the knitted cast-on. This is a trick I learned from Kelley Petkun (of Knit Picks fame) and it's particularly effective because the motions of the cast-on are the same as actual knitting.

I then showed her the basic knit stitch, and when she had done a few rows of that, I showed her how to purl, and then how to bind off. I also showed her the long-tail cast-on, just because I like the look of it better than the knitted cast-on, and if she's going to be knitting a gorgeous scarf for her boyfriend, it aught to look as professional as possible.

It was particularly helpful that S is German, and so learned to knit as a child in school using the Continental style, which is the one I use. I don't particularly have anything against the English style and I'm able to do it, if necessary, but I'm not very good at it. Anyway, it was nice to be able to share knitting theory with S, a lot of which I learned from Debbie Stoller's Stitch 'n Bitch, without having to think about how I was making the stitches myself.

I'm certain that she'll be well on her way to making her boyfriend a wonderful scarf before long, and I'm definitely looking forward to our next knitting lesson.

Pesto

2010-10-11T12:47:00.000-07:00

For as long as I can remember, my mom has always grown her own basil to make pesto.

At the end of summer, when the basil plants had developed to their full potential, Mom would go in with the secateurs and cut down the tall stalks, leaving only the bottom leaves to grow into a second crop. Then began the lengthy process of plucking all the leaves off the stalks.

She would have the food processor going all day, combining the fresh basil leaves with parsley, pine nuts, garlic, parmesan and olive oil (using Molly Katzen's Moosewood recipe) to make this gorgeous stuff.

Every year, she gets quite a lot of pesto out of it.

This year, when I was visiting home at the end of August, I helped out a bit, but even when I don't, I still try to take some home with me. The boyfriend and I put some in almost everything... including this gorgeous homemade pasta with mushrooms and spicy seasonal vegetables:

So Ma, we've just run out... time for a care package?

An easy baby blanket

2010-10-08T08:23:00.000-07:00

I really enjoy projects where I start with a few new balls of wool, and by the end of it, I've used it all up. That way, there are no pesky leftovers that you feel obligated to keep because there's too much to throw out (and for me, more than a foot of yarn is too much to throw out). This is why, when I decided to knit a baby blanket for my friends J&A's baby shower, I went with Lion Brand's Baby Love Diagonal Baby Blanket, which has a stupid name, but an interesting principle.

I bought two balls of James C. Brett Marble Chunky (in the Adobe colourway) and started by casting on 3 stitches, then increased one stitch per row until I'd run out of yarn from the first ball. Then I just had to attach the second ball and decrease until I got to the opposite corner. You don't have to worry about how wide or long the blanket is going to be to get the optimal usage out of your yarn because the thing will always turn out square.

I modified the first few rows by doing a knit-front-back-loop until I had 6 stitches, and then started the increases with the yarn overs as written. For the last few rows, I only did the yarn overs until 6 stitches remained and then I just decreased by doing one knit two together per row until I had 3 stitches left and bound off. I found it made for a much nicer square edge.

I was really digging the ribbon some people had threaded through the eyelets created by the yarn overs, and so decided to give that a try. After unsuccessfully knitting a really long icord and running out of yarn before it was long enough, I caved and bought a pretty green ribbon to use instead. In retrospect, it probably wasn't the greatest solution, and if I were to do it again, I would go for the icord. As it turns out, satin ribbon isn't very stretchy, and garter stitch fabric is. This means that whenever I'd move the blanket around the ribbon would slide around in the eyelets and the blanket would stretch in weird ways.

Besides the ribbon, however, I'm pretty happy with this blanket. The yarn is so soft and squishy, which is only accentuated by the garter stitch, and the colours are beautiful. I would probably make this pattern again.

Slinky skinny lacy beaded scarf

2010-10-01T06:36:00.001-07:00

Lately, I've been doing that thing people call "burning the candle at both ends", a condition brought upon by deadlines for grant applications and generally having way too much on my plate with the start of classes. As a result, I'm sick for the second time in two weeks, most likely the end product of getting fewer than 5 hours of sleep most nights and not eating regular meals... and maybe some stress thrown in there. For not getting sick in a whole year, I'm certainly making up for it now.

Anyway, enough about my health. Let's talk about pretty shiny things. I like pretty shiny things, things like my new pretty slinky skinny lacy beaded scarf. I started it during the Stitch 'n Pitch in July and finished it up during my trip to the Townships in August, and it was my first attempt at knitting with beads, which, I'll admit, was a little annoying. At least, having all 200-something beads strung on the yarn beforehand and having to pull the yarn through them all is pretty annoying. I would find another way to do it next time.

The yarn however, some Dye-Version Bamboo Sport I bought at the Purple Purl way back in August, 2009, was an absolute joy to work with... So silky and smooth...

I used the Twin-Leaf beaded scarf pattern by Jeanne Giles, which was pretty easy to memorize after a few repeats. I did 51 repeats in total, which made the whole thing over 6 feet long... pretty sizable. Again, knitting the beads was slightly annoying, but kind of neat, and I absolutely love the end result. Enough that I'd do it again in a different pattern. Anyway, I didn't make any major changes, so without further ado, here are the pretty pictures:

Buffy/Zero Punctuation Pot Holders

2010-09-23T06:55:00.000-07:00

One of my primary reasons for visiting the Townships last month was to attend a good friend's wedding party. They got married in early July, but didn't have the reception until later for logistical reasons. At any rate, it was incredibly fun, and I got to see a lot of people I hadn't seen in ages.

As has apparently become a tradition for me, I made them double-knit pot holders. She is a big Buffy the Vampire Slayer fan and he's really into video games, so for one pot holder, I used the chart from this scarf pattern to make a Buffy B, and for the other, I decided to make my own chart for the demon from Zero Punctuation, a hilarious video game review site that I know he enjoys. Both turned out as well as I could have hoped for.

I have never seen any Zero Punctuation knitting patterns on the interwebs, and so, here is my ground-breaking foray into this neglected area of geeky crafting. If you want to make your own double-knit ZP pot holders, follow the basic instructions for my Star Trek Pot holders, but instead of using the Star Trek chart, use this one:

You'll also have to cast on 29 stitches instead of 30, and knit for 44 rows instead of 46. Enjoy!

Savta

2010-09-22T20:37:00.000-07:00

I was looking through old photos on my computer, searching for images I might have taken of astronomy public tours for our new image gallery. I didn't find many, but I did this little gem:

This was taken on April 11th, 2009, and it's my grandmother, Savta, as seen in the rearview mirror from the back seat of my parents' car. It was her birthday, and she's wearing the beret that I crocheted for her. I don't think I was satisfied with the picture when I took it, which is probably why I didn't post it back then, but I did some judicious cropping, and now I can't stop looking at it. Savta looks like a ghost... Maybe more so because I feel so guilty for not visiting her in such a long time... I should get around to that.

The Pinnacle

2010-09-21T14:29:00.000-07:00

About a month ago (how time flies when school gets started!), I spent almost two weeks in the Townships visiting my parents. I had a really nice time visiting old profs, seeing old friends, partying down at a wedding reception, and most importantly, relaxing. One highlight of the trip was hiking up the Pinnacle in Baldwin Mills. It's a fairly easy hike (we were able to do it with a 7-month pregnant lady in our party), and the scenery pay-off is pretty fantastic.

Without further ado, here are some of my favourite pictures from the hike. I hope you all become envious of the beautiful place I grew up in.

A beautiful cabled sweater

2010-09-16T11:14:00.000-07:00

My last couple of posts have been real downers, so I think I'll have to write about something super awesome and happy. How's about a new sweater that I absolutely LOVE. Way back in March, I started the Cable Luxe Tunic from Lion Brand, and I just finished knitting it, weaving in the ends and blocking it about a week ago. And it turned out wonderfully... really, I couldn't be more happy with it!

Before I get into the long technical details of how I made this sweater, I'll just say that it was knit with 3.75 skeins of Araucania Nature Wools Solid in the smoky purple colourway. It's a very nice yarn to knit with and the finished product isn't too itchy, even though it's 100% wool. One complaint would that even skeins in the same dye lot didn't have the same range of light to dark, some having very saturated dye and others with a smaller gradient. Not a big deal, I guess... it certainly felt organic and unpredictable.

Now, I made a LOT of changes from the original pattern. The thing is worked more or less in one piece, starting with the cabled yoke which is worked flat with the two short ends sewn together. Then, stitches are picked up for the body and arms, which are knit downwards, and then more stitches are picked up from the other side of the yoke to knit up a collar. The first change I made was to knit these picked-up pieces in the round instead of flat.

For the body, I knit the back up to where the armhole shaping ended, put it on waste yarn and then knit the front to the same spot and simply joined them together on a circular needle. This meant I didn't have to pay as much attention to keeping my gauge even or pay as much attention to the waist shaping. The fact that the pattern says to knit the front and the back flat and then seam them together actually seems pretty retarded to me. I also did the sleeves in the round, using the magic loop technique for the first time. All this meant was that the only seam I had to sew was under the arms. Woohoo!

I also added a considerable amount of shaping. The original pattern actually calls for increases to make it look more like a dress or something, and I wanted it to look form-flattering. I decreased 16 stitches for the waist, and then increased 12 stitches for the hips, skipping three rows between each decrease round. I did this in the reverse stockinette section under the arms, and decreases barely show. I also decreased 20 stitches for each arm to have a fitted sleeve, and did 2x2 ribbing at the end of the sleeves and at the hips. The original pattern just has a rolled hem. Finally, instead of the garter stitch collar, I did a k2 p3 ribbing, decreased every other p3 section every 6 rows until it was 2x2 ribbing.

In conclusion, my sweater is way more awesome and pretty than the original pattern!

RIP Purple Lacy Hat...

2010-09-13T21:18:00.000-07:00

Today started out a little chilly, in the 15 degrees Celsius range, and so I decided to wear my pretty purple lacy hat because it was warm enough to keep my ears toasty without being too heavy. A good transition piece, as they say. Then, as I was leaving the office this evening, I noticed that my hat was no longer in my jacket sleeve... I had gone to dinner, completely forgetting I had stuffed it in there, and my hat must have slipped out of my sleeve either on the way to or at the restaurant.

On my way home from school this evening, I completely retraced the path I took to the restaurant, searched the patio where we had been sitting, and asked the restaurant staff if they had seen it, but no luck. My hat is gone forever, and I'm sad. It's not like it was my favourite hat, but it was the first really complicated lace project I had made and it was knit from a lovely soft angora cotton blend in my favourite colour. It's probably not going to be the last creation that gets lost or destroyed, but the first one probably hurts the most. I hope that someone found it, and that whoever that might be will get some good use out of it.

I'll miss you pretty purple lacy hat...

At loose ends...

2010-09-09T06:33:00.000-07:00

Hey internet! I honestly have all sorts of awesome travel-related and craft-related stuff to talk about, but I'm feeling rather lackluster about writing blog entries right now. (Is that why I'm writing a blog entry about it?) I'm sure I'll get back into it now that school is starting up again, and I'll have a more set schedule. Summer is lazy time.

The other thing that's been bugging me is that I don't seem to know where I'm going with my craft. I made baby stuff for a while, then I more or less got sick of that (though I'm thinking baby legwarmers would be fun), then I was making a bunch of stuff for me, like a new sweater and a silky skinny lacy scarf (which I'll write about on their own someday). And now, it's almost time to get into Christmas knitting, but not quite...

Mostly I want to knit crazy cables (I've started these) and beautiful lace, but now that school's starting, I need to work on things that I don't need to pay attention to... Like simple stockinette sweaters or whatever. *sigh*

Anyway, you'll hear more from me soon, hopefully about something interesting.

Nerdfest!

2010-09-05T07:23:00.000-07:00

Last weekend, I experienced my very first Fan Expo (also known as Nerdfest among my friends), a convention for fans of comics, anime, horror, science fiction and video games. A lot of people complained about the line-ups, and they were indeed pretty bad (especially for getting in, even if you had a Deluxe pass), but I did have a lot of fun.

The first day, after spending almost 2 hours in line (and getting in a little over an hour after the expo started), I mostly just looked around the different booths. I was hoping to see the Q & A with Leslie Nielsen, who is arguably one of the coolest people to have ever lived, but he was absent due to illness... I was really disappointed, and given that he's in his 80s, there might not be another chance to see him.

I did get to see my friends Ben Rivers, and Zen Rankin, both independent comic book artists here in Toronto, and a lot of other really cool independent artists, including Lara Aiken, Uyugomiak (try saying that ten times fast), My Ghoul Friday, and Richard A. Kirk. I actually bought something from almost all of them...

A cute little eyeball plant from My Ghoul Friday:

A zombie and a schoolgirl from Lara Aiken:

A print of Richard A. Kirk's Triplets (picture from Richard's facebook page):

I also spent a lot of time at the Ubisoft booth since a very good friend of the friend I went with was working there. The most awesome thing there was the Scott Pilgrim video game (pretty good preview here), which I might have played way too much. If I had an Xbox 360, I would totally have bought this in a second. It was also right across from the Batmobile... which was pretty awesome.

Besides that, I also got to see Stan Lee, William Shatner and Summer Glau (my crappy videos of some of their Q & As here, here and here). It was really neat to see all the celebrities. Adam West and Burt Ward were also there, but we were too exhausted to go see them. There were also autograph sessions for a lot of famous stars, but at $30 and up for an autograph and a picture, it didn't seem entirely worth it. Here are some more highlights:

Stormtroopers:

Playing the Torontotron version of Mondrian Provoked:

Boob mousepads:

Full-sized LEGO models of Darth Vader and Jango Fett:

An Afternoon at the Allen Gardens

2010-08-21T06:39:00.000-07:00

I'm currently in the Townships visiting my parents, but I thought I'd write an entry about something that happened almost a month ago... During the last week of August, my mom and my friend Stevie came to visit. Mom's primary purpose was to visit her mother, but Stevie wanted to do some touristy things. He suggested we go to the Allen Gardens, which, to be frank, I had never heard of before. My mom told me that she used to go there as a kid with her parents in the middle of February to escape into a tropical paradise for a few moments. It's totally free to go, and has been around since 1858.

At the centre of the park is the Palm House, a structure built in 1909 which houses a variety of tropical plants. My favourite was the cactus room.

Here are a few of the better pictures I took:

Happy birthday, EZ!

2010-08-09T20:01:00.000-07:00

Today is Elizabeth Zimmermann's 100th birthday. Considering she was more or less the godmother of modern knitting, I feel I should do something special to commemorate this occasion. Like write a blog post... that's special, right?

Anyway, I feel like I started to follow a lot of EZ's philosophies before I even knew who she was. Ever since I started knitting, I've always preferred working with circular needles even when knitting back and forth, just because of their portability and ease of use, and Continental Knitting has always seemed more natural to me, probably because of my crochet background. I also like to think that I'm a fearless knitter... my first real project was an illusion scarf for the boyfriend with two-colour stripes, a charted image and a 3-needle bind-off (though kitchener stitch would have worked better, in hindsight).

The first book of hers I owned, I only got this year. It's The Opinionated Knitter, a collection of her Wool Gathering newsletters with a lot of her most famous patterns, including the baby surprise jacket (which I knit earlier this summer), the Tomten jacket, and her famous EPS (Elizabeth Percentage System), which allows you to knit a sweater to any gauge.

It's a really lovely book, with little stories along the way, and exact copies of the original newsletters. I read it from cover to cover, and cried a little bit at the final newsletter Meg Swansen wrote about the death of her mother. I've only made a couple of the patterns from this book (the afore-mentioned BSJ and matching Bootees), but I think that in honour of EZ's birthday, I'll cast on another project in the near future, perhaps the Nether Garments (some pretty fancy leggings).

I'll leave you with this quote, shamelessly stolen from LadyRadagast and the Celebrating 100 years of Elizabeth Zimmermann discussion on Ravelry:

“All you need to become a good knitter are wool, needles, hands, & slightly below-average intelligence. Of course superior intelligence, such as yours & mine, is an advantage.” -Elizabeth Zimmermann

Deadly Nightshade in Toronto

2010-08-07T09:55:00.000-07:00

It's interesting where the internet will take you... I started out today wanting to write a blog entry about a picture I took of what I thought to be belladona, or deadly nightshade, growing in a hedge on campus, and then to talk about how cool belladonna is.

However, I looked at my pictures, and then at the entry for Deadly Nightshade (a.k.a. Atropa Belladonna) on Wikipedia, and the flowers and the berries look a little bit different than this poisonous plant.

It turns out that this plant is actually Bittersweet Nightshade (a.k.a. Solanum Dulcamara), which is in the same family as belladonna, but not nearly as poisonous. I still wouldn't eat it. In fact, it's an invasive plant in this area, so I should probably have ripped it out, but the berries and flowers are so cute! Of course, I had to read about it on wikipedia for another half-hour...

Anyway, I have a few reasons to be interested in nightshade, one of which is that the Deadly Nightshade sleeves I knit a couple of months ago are based on that plant. Another is that nightshade is in the same family as tomatoes, potatoes, peppers, and eggplants. The main toxin in bittersweet nightshade is solanine, which is present in small amounts in all of these, I think, especially potatoes that have been exposed to light for too long.

I'm fairly allergic to eggplants. When I eat enough of them, I get a stomach ache and a sore throat, and it feels like my airways are closing up, which, according to ehow, means I should go to the emergency room when I have a reaction. I'm not sure if it's the solanine in eggplant that makes me sick, but I've never had any problems with other members of the Solanum genus.

So this lead me to research eggplant allergies, which are apparently very rare, and this lead me to this article talking about a study performed in India on a guy who was allergic to eggplant... and then I got bored, played Mah Jong for a while and fell asleep.

My first Stitch 'n Pitch

2010-08-05T12:33:00.000-07:00

Last week, I went to my first Stitch 'n Pitch. To those of you unfamiliar with the concept, this is where a bunch of knitters (and crocheters, I suppose, though I didn't see any there) go to a baseball game and knit. And watch the game... sorta. I went with a few of my knitting group friends, and it ended up being a lot of fun, even though I don't have a lot of interest in baseball. The Toronto Blue Jays played the Baltimore Orioles and won 8 to 2.

Here we are in the crowd (I'm in the middle of the third row with the light purple t-shirt):

It wasn't very full besides the knitters...

But we did have very good seats.

And got a lot of knitting done (that's E's fish hat).

I worked a bit on the second sleeve of my cabled sweater (almost done! almost done!), and started a pretty lacy scarf using that beautiful skein of Dye-Version bamboo sport I got at the Purple purl ages ago. It's the Twin-Leaf Beaded Scarf pattern by Jeanne Giles, and I have to admit that knitting with beads is pretty annoying at first, but really cool once you get used to it.

I have some more knitted baby stuff to post, but I think it'll have to wait until after I've given them to the intended recipients so as not to spoil the surprise.

The Post-Qual Slump

2010-08-01T13:37:00.000-07:00

I believe I am experiencing what they call the post-qual slump (as extensively documented by PhD comics). I have come to this conclusion because all I have been able to do over the last few days is read blogs (Hyperbole and a half is super rad) and pop bubble wrap, sometimes with my toes because I'm too lazy to actually hold the bubble wrap. Wow... I'm sad.

Hopefully I'll post something interesting soon... you know, when I'm less lazy.

The World's Most Famous Baby Jacket

2010-07-19T06:29:00.000-07:00

There are several reasons why Elizabeth Zimmermann (EZ) is the knitting icon of the 20th century, and one of these is the Baby Surprise Jacket. It's an ingeniously constructed piece of knitting, where you start at the collar and along the length of the sleeves, decrease for a while to shape the sleeves, and then increase for a while to shape the lower body of the little jacket. After you bind off, you end up with this strangely misshapen rectangle, but if you fold it just so and seam up the top of the sleeves, you end up with one of the cutest little baby jackets ever.

I recently got an opportunity to make one of these when I found out my cousin is pregnant. Mom had given me EZ's The Opinionated Knitter for Christmas, and so I had the pattern all ready to go. By the way, if you only get one EZ book, this is the one you should buy. It's pretty damn awesome. Anyway, I copied the pattern into my little notebook, balled up a skein of Noro Kureyon Sock, picked out some 3.75mm needles from my interchangeable needle kit, and threw everything into my suitcase for my trip to NRDA.

I managed to knit the entire sweater during the conference. Seriously... I cast on on the Thursday, and bound off during the car ride back on Saturday. The fact that I was sitting through hours and hours of talks (and that the wi-fi on my laptop refused to work) certainly didn't hurt, but I think I'll attribute the speediness of this pattern to the rows of mindless garter stitch paired with fairly intuitive increases, once you get the hang of it. I only had to look at my written pattern a few times to check how many increases or decreases I was supposed to be doing. It also didn't hurt that the colour changes in the Noro are absolutely fabulous.

I should say something about that yarn. Reading comments on Ravelry, people seem to have a love/hate relationship with Noro. They complain that it's scratchy, that there are lots of knots, that they find little pieces of hay in the yarn, that the thickness is too inconsistent to knit socks with, but then they also just go crazy over the colours. In my ball, I found only one knot (and so took the opportunity to do my own version of a Russian join) and quite a few pieces of hay. However, the knot happened where the colours more or less matched up, so that was ok. I was actually pretty lucky when it came to that knot. The colour changes were supposed to go from pink to green to yellow, but because of the knot, they went from pink to green to pink again. This meant that after picking up the stitches, the pink continued in the right place! Rather fortunate coincidence, I think. The yarn was also rather thick & thin, in some places it was as thin as crochet cotton and in others as thick as heavy worsted, but considering my needle size, and that the sweater was garter stitch, it didn't matter so much. It was also not quite as scratchy as I had expected.

But the colours... oh the colours! My pictures don't quite capture the depth of the colours of this yarn. I think the trick is that they don't dye the yarn after it's spun (or even the roving with multiple colours at a time), but instead spin in one colour for a while, and gradually introduce roving of a different colour. If you look closely at the yarn where the colour changes, you can see two strands of colour spun together. It gives the illusion of the colours bleeding into one another without the muddiness that would result from dying the colours long enough to obtain the same vibrancy. This way, they can dye a piece of roving in one colour, as long as they want to get the intensity of colour you see in the final project. Pretty smart, actually.

To go with the jacket, I decided to also knit up some Bootees, also an EZ pattern from the same book. They're knit in a similar way to the BSJ, by decreasing to a point, picking up stitches along the side of the knitting and then increasing until the piece of fabric can be folded to make a little foot shape. Because of the colour changes in the Noro, mine ended up being completely different colours, which is ok because even though they don't match each other, they both match the jacket. I also decided not to sew the booties all the way up the leg, as suggested in the pattern, but instead leave the upper part open so that the top parts can be folded down to look like little elf shoes! I also added i-cords to be tied in the back to give it a bit of a girly touch (the baby will indeed be of that gender).

My cousin reacted appropriately with all the squeals and thank-yous she could muster, and so I think she can probably expect to receive more baby things in the future... muahahahaha!

Baby stuff! (aka instant gratification knitting)

2010-07-17T07:03:00.001-07:00

As I've hinted at in some previous posts, I've been doing a lot of baby knitting lately. Two important people in my life, my cousin and a friend from my hometown, A and his wife J, are expecting to have babies at roughly the same time, which, of course, means knitting lots and lots of baby things! Oh my... I've been overcome by the cuteness more than once.

The ultimate in cute baby knitting, in my humble opinion, is baby booties. Therefore, the very first thing I made for J & A's baby was a pair of these absolutely adorable baby booties, using the Blue Steps pattern by Regina Willer. It's a pretty awesome pattern, mostly because it doesn't require any seaming (Huzzah!). I made these in an unidentified blue 4-ply sock yarn from my grandmother's stash.

They're knit from the bottom of the foot up, and I think I might have screwed up the initial cast-on a bit because the seam somehow ended up on the outside of the booty, but I guess that's ok. I also had to do a single crochet bind-off so that the top would have enough stretch to fit around a fat little ankle. Also, I learned how to do brioche stitch ribbing!

I thought it would be nice to make a little hat to go with the booties, so, using the same yarn, I knit up a little beanie. I couldn't find a pattern I liked, so I made up my own. I cast on 104 sts, knit the brioche stitch ribbing for about an inch and a half, knit three ridges worth of garter stitch, and then started decreasing after about 3 and a half inches. I decreased 8 sts every other round until there were 40 sts left, and then decreased every round. I ended up with 4 sts at the top, and finished it off with a short icord. It's pretty damn adorable.

And now, this post is getting a little long, and I really should be getting back to writing a thesis proposal. Next time, the world's most famous baby sweater!

NRDA 2010

2010-07-12T15:58:00.000-07:00

One of the joys of being a grad student is that I get paid to travel to conferences! I already talked about my trip to Halifax, but this more recent conference didn't take me quite as far afield. The last week of June, I went to NRDA (Numerical Relativity and Data Analysis) at the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, only an hour's drive from Toronto.

This conference is meant to bring together the gravitational wave community, so those people who study the gravitational effects of black holes (and other compact objects) crashing into each other. This includes numerical relativity, gravitational wave detector data analysis, theoretical models of gravitational waves, etc. It was associated with CAPRA, which was more on the theoretical side, and which I skipped most of. It was great going to all these talks in my field and learning about what other people are doing. I found it much more interesting than CASCA where the majority of talks weren't in my field. I also got to meet most of the authors of the various papers I've been reading for my research. It's really cool to put faces to all those names.

I presented a poster with my research so far:

Another couple of people are actually working on the same thing (error estimation for hybrid waveforms), so I've got to get my butt in gear and actually publish. Too bad I have the second part of my qual in less than 2 weeks!

Other highlights included a nearby lake (more like a pond) and petting zoo with baby ducks!

Really fancy lunches

Really fancy desserts at out-of-the-way vegetarian restaurants

Interesting architecture at the Perimeter Institute

And knitting an entire baby sweater in four days (more on this later)

The world-renowned physicist Stephen Hawking is also visiting the PI right now, and I did in fact get a chance to see him. However, I was way too shy to talk to him or take a picture... oh well.

Two Socks at a Time!

2010-07-05T18:43:00.000-07:00

So, when people knit two socks at once, it's usually with the Magic Loop technique or with two long circular needles. However, there's a certain elegant aesthetic that comes with knitting socks on double-pointed needles that you don't get when there are mad wires flying everywhere. But all is not lost! You can have the best of both worlds when you learn how to do double knitting!

I've mentioned a couple of times that Knitty article which deals with knitting two socks at once, one inside the other, on double-pointed needles, and also the pattern from Knitting Traditions Magazine which explained a similar technique. Well, I thought it was about high time I tried this interesting and intriguing sock-knitting method.

I started off with this deliciously colourful, yet wonderfully cheap, acrylic/polyester yarn (called Gala Mixed Fibre from Mary Maxim). It was so on sale that it would have been crazy to pass it up... something like $1.50 a ball. At that price, I was pretty sure it would be super crappy, but it wasn't nearly as bad as I thought it would be. A teensy bit on the scratchy side, and really pilly when it rubs against things, but the colours are super fun.

I used the cast-on method from the Knitty article, and knit the ribbings on the needles together. I then continued in the manner of the Knitting Traditions article by purling the outside sock and knitting the inside sock. I'm not sure if this is the best method, since I knit much looser than I purl, but the socks ended up being roughly the same size, and it was easier to keep track of the different threads this way. I didn't hold one yarn in each hand as recommended by both articles, but instead had them over my left index finger, and though the separate threads twisted together a bit, it didn't bother me too much. The only time I mixed up the front sock thread and the back sock thread was when I was knitting the ribbing.

Even after four pairs of socks, I've never knit a heel flap, and this time was no different. The Knitty article indicated that short row heels were the easiest to do in double-knit socks, and so I stuck with that. I'm fairly happy with the result... and I only screwed up one wrap and turn when knitting at a dark and drunken party. The stitches ended up being a little loose, and the same happened for the toe decrease, but that worked itself out after washing.

And so, I ended up with these crazy striped, super fun-looking socks! They feel a little funny on my feet, I think because of the fibre, but I'm sure they'll soften up as I wear them more. They're definitely socks I would wear regularly, and they fit nicely. This was an interesting experiment, and I'm happy that I got something wearable in the end... I wasn't too sure what to expect, but I'm pretty sure that I would do socks like this again. Now, if only I could figure out a way to double-knit socks toe-up!

Pretty earrings for Mom

2010-06-29T17:25:00.000-07:00

Things, as usual, have been very busy. I found out that I did indeed pass my general qual (like there was ever any doubt!), and then rushed to get my research poster finished and printed for the NRDA conference last week. I'll save the details of that trip for a separate post. I got back into the city Saturday evening among all the G20 craziness, but fortunately, my supervisor gave me a ride in his rented car, and I was able to avoid downtown. Now, I should be rewriting my code to be able to accept multiple hybrid combinations in a row, but I've come down with a terrible headache and so I'm blogging instead. May as well be sort of productive!

Today I thought I'd show you some pictures of these earrings I made my mom back in February (better late than never, right?), which I had intended to also act as stitch markers, though I don't think Mom's used them in that capacity, which is fine. I bought a couple of sets of clip-on earring findings at Mary Maxim, one gold set and one silver set. For the gold ones, I decided to make it simple, and just thread a few beads onto a headpin and make a loop with my trusty needle-nose pliers.

I think they're actually quite cute, and I really like the look of gold and red together... it's got something of the regal to it. For the silver earrings, I decided to go a little more on the fancy side. I based these on the Chandeliers from the Anticraft, but I didn't have enough jump rings to do the pattern suggested in the book, so I made it up a little as I went along.

Making chainmail is kind of frustrating since if you put a ring through the wrong way, it totally doesn't work anymore, but I guess that's more or less true of any craft. Even though it's not terribly forgiving, I think I would try it again, just gotta buy me more jump rings.

So, that was my latest jewellery-making extravaganza. I should really do more of it. Next time we speak, I will probably show you some amazing baby knitting! Oh the cuteness!

And hey, the drugs just kicked in and my headache's gone! Woo!

Deadly Nightshade sleeves

2010-06-18T04:48:00.000-07:00

Ahhhh... the post-qual slump! Well, not quite. I did finish my general qualifying exam on Tuesday (and I won't know if I pass until next week, argh!), but I still have to pass a thesis qual which will involve presenting my thesis topic and answering questions related to it. I'm also attending a conference at the Perimeter Institute next week, and have to prepare a poster for that. Sooo... I'm not exactly going to be able to relax for the next month or so.

Anyway, I thought I'd talk to you today about a project that was the embodiment of how much I hate finishing. This is the Belladonna Sleeves (Ravelry link) by Erssie Major from Anticraft, a book I really can't praise enough... I mean, this is my second project from this book, which is more than I can say for most of my books (with the exception of Son of Stitch 'n Bitch and Crochet Me).

So the pattern is basically supposed to represent a belladonna (or deadly nightshade) plant with a fluted opening for the cuffs symbolizing the flower and these big ol' bobbles that are supposed to be like the berries. Well, I'm not so much into bobbles (they remind me too much of pimples), so I decided to forgo those in my version, and I'm very happy with that decision. I also didn't decrease for the ribbing (probably a mistake), or change needle size, but I did sew an elastic ribbon into the tops, which seems to prevent any slippage problems.

The yarn I used was Plymouth Yarn Baby Alpaca Worsted Glow, a lovely lovely lovely soft worsted alpaca with little shiny threads woven throughout. The colour is a beautiful dark plum, but I don't know what the name of the colourway is. Unfortunately, I think this particular yarn has been discontinued, but I got it from WEBS at a discount.

The reason this project is the embodiment of how much I hate finishing is that it took me from April 14th to April 30th to actually knit the sleeves, but I didn't actually finish sewing in the elastics until May 19th... Yes, that's right. It took me longer to sew in a couple of elastic bands than to knit two whole sleeves. I don't know why... I already had all the materials, and when I actually sat down to do it, it probably took less than an hour. I guess this is why I should just stick to projects where it's done as soon as it comes off the needles with maybe a couple of ends to sew in. I just have no patience for all that non-knitting (or crocheting) stuff!

Interchangeable needles

2010-06-12T09:26:00.000-07:00

A few days before I went to Halifax, it was my birthday. A few days before that, I was woken up by the boyfriend who unceremoniously plopped something on top of me and groggily mumbled, "Happy Birthday..." The briefly mysterious early birthday present looked like this:

And inside, it looked like this:

And in the side pouch, there were these:

Hurray! It's a KA bamboo interchangeable needle kit! It has 3.75mm to 10mm sized needles (10 sizes in total) with wire lengths 16 to 53 inches. With the exception of projects needing teeny tiny needles (like socks), I think I have all the needles I'll ever need just in that kit.

They're really high quality too. The boyfriend certainly did his research. The bamboo feels really nice to work with (I used to be an aluminium-only girl, but I think I've converted), and the screws to attach the needles to the cable are really high quality. They're designed so that they won't come unscrewed while you're knitting since the cable will twist independently of the screwing bit. It's a pretty good design.

I have the bestest boyfriend in the whole wide world!

My CASCA shawl

2010-06-06T18:31:00.000-07:00

I'm completely unable to sit through scientific talks without falling asleep unless I'm doing something with my hands. Since I wasn't sure about bringing my knitting needles on the plane to Halifax, I decided to start a new crochet project during CASCA. I wanted to choose something that wouldn't require too much attention to gauge and that I wouldn't need to try on as I went, and so I picked the Sweet Pea shawl by Amie Hirtes from the Happy Hooker.

The yarn I chose was Vanna's Glamour from Lion Brand Yarns. This is my first time using a LB yarn, despite devoutly listening to every episode of Yarncraft, and I wasn't disappointed. I found it to be a little inconsistent in width, and it stained my new bamboo crochet hook blue, but I did like the sparkliness. Sparkliness is good.

Overall, I'm pretty happy with this pattern. It wasn't so easy that it was boring, but I was able to memorize the stitch pattern fairly easily. By the time I started getting sick of the pattern, I was almost done. The results were certainly good, and I didn't even have to block it. I was worried about using such a thin yarn with a 6mm hook, but it ended up ok in the end. Hurray!

CASCA 2010 a.k.a. Good times in Halifax!

2010-05-31T13:21:00.000-07:00

One of the major reasons I haven't written in so long is that I've been working like a madwoman trying to get my research ready for CASCA, the annual conference of the Canadian Astronomical Society, which took place at Saint Mary's University in Halifax this year. It was mostly an excuse to travel a bit, meet some new people and drink a lot, but I also enjoyed being immersed in Astronomy.

I presented a poster on my current research, and also gave a talk about the monthly Astronomy Public Tours I help organize. The poster was rushed to the very last minute... I only finished it the afternoon before I got on the plane, and thus had to get it printed in Halifax. The print shop had it ready the half hour before they were closing for the day, and so I rushed to pick it up because I underestimated how much time it would take to walk there. Everything worked out in the end, and I was able to get my poster up by the first poster session. Phew! My talk was slightly less stressful, but only because I didn't have to rely as much on my science smarts. I was in communication with the previous graduate students in charge of the public tours, and so had lots of interesting information to present. People seemed impressed with how much the tours had grown over the last couple of years, since our attendance has more or less tripled in that time.

Highlights of the trip included eating lobster by the sea (I named her Eunice):

Drinking fancy alcoholic beverages:

Beautiful views:

And sitting next to the landing gear on the aeroplane (yay Porter!):

The Day the Sky Fell

2010-04-26T05:12:00.000-07:00

A couple of weeks ago, I felt a little like Chicken Little, except I was right, dammit! My story begins a little before that. It seems we've started to get a little bit of water damage in our ceiling, and in our bathroom, it got quite bad, as can be seen in the following picture:

This crack was at least a meter across and coming down an inch from the ceiling. So, on this fateful Friday night two weeks or so ago, I was sitting in the living room, watching TV and knitting, the boyfriend out at a concert with some of his friends, when I hear a big crash from the direction of the bathroom. It was quite a windy night, so I thought maybe the wind had blown something off the windowsill, so I check the bedroom and the computer room and then the bathroom last, since we didn't have anything on the bathroom windowsill except shampoo bottles, and they don't exactly shatter when they fall. So, I looked in the bathroom and encountered this:

These huge flakes of paint were all over the floor. And I can only imagine that that ceiling must have been painted over dozens and dozens of times because they were several millimeters thick.

Early the next morning, I heard another crash, and more of the ceiling had fallen off with a large piece hanging over the door that subsequently fell on my head when I tried closing said door. Ceiling paint is sharp. Anyway, it's all cleaned up now, and looks like it won't fall down anymore (though there's not much paint left on our ceiling to fall down). We just have to get some sort of work order filled out so we can get the damn thing fixed.

Hundreds of crocuses

2010-04-22T19:08:00.000-07:00

A defiant spread of crocuses, jagged,
Noble, everywhere in interstices
Of soil between rocks, showed,
Indifferent -- oh, indifferent. Whether
Prophecy had god, had doom in it
To come, they exulted, white,
Purple, stamens gold, six petals,
Unknown except you bend down to it.
But colour far, near, some yellow,
Out of the debris of April roots,
And marks and tendrils left in the snow gone.
Nobility was there to see, never
Mind resurrection, beauty
Was here.
_______A path of landscape,
An acre.
_______I gazed.
You looked again and to the right, behind,
A bunch of crocuses grew there.

-- Ralph Gustafson (1909-1995)

Note: I don't think those flowers are actually crocuses, but ever since the little flowers have started poking their heads through the grass, I've had this poem in my head. Ralph Gustafson lived near my hometown until he didn't live anymore, and my dad set a lot of his poetry to music, and I've been humming the tune to this one over and over...

Knitting Traditions magazine

2010-04-21T06:00:00.001-07:00

Despite my scholarly attitudes, I don't really read all that much for pleasure. I have a craft library of a dozen books, a few of which I've actually read cover to cover, but considering my obsession with things yarny, it doesn't seem like that much. I know if I had a subscription to any sort of crafting magazine, most of the articles would go unread, and I'd likely have a backlog of magazines to read (such as with our WIRED subscription right now). I need not even mention my to-read pile of books I received as gifts that I really should get around to picking up. I haven't bought a pleasure-reading book for myself in years.

Thus, it was totally unnecessary for me to buy the special Piecework issue called "Knitting Traditions" from Interweave. But you know... it was 43 patterns for $20, all of which are socks, lace or baby items, items I'm currently slightly obsessed with. And we all know how I feel about vintage and complex patterns. (Well, if you don't, suffice it to say I'm drawn to them.)

I actually have read this publication from cover to cover, and it only took me a month or so to get through it! Seriously... Anyway, all the projects are really nice. There are a few I would probably never make, and a few I would think about making if I didn't have a ridiculously long list of projects in my queue. However, there are also a lot of projects I definitely want to try. I'll go through these briefly.

In the sock department, it was mostly techniques that impressed me. The "Floral-Motif Bulgarian Socks" by Priscilla Gibson-Roberts are based on a traditional Bulgarian design (duh), and incorporate a really interesting method of incorporating colourwork while knitting in the round. It involves slipping stitches and going back with the background colour... something I'll actually have to try to fully understand, I think. I don't know if I'll ever make this exact pair of socks, but I'll definitely keep the technique in mind if I want to do colourwork in the round.

The next sock technique that really impressed me was the method for knitting two socks at a time one inside the other on double-pointed needles using a double-knitting technique by Jacqueline Fee. This is not something new to me, since I discovered it when I was first learning about double-knitting in this Knitty article by Kory Stamper. I think I actually prefer the Knitty article because it shows you how to cast on two at a time while the Knitting Traditions article suggests knitting the ribbing separately. It's still nice to have the article in print with pretty pictures and everything.

All the baby items are gorgeous, but I can't see myself actually trying any of the patterns because babies grow so fast and I don't believe in putting so much work into something that will only be worn for a few months. There are also quite a few glove and sweater patterns that look nice. I can see one or two I would think about making, but for the most part, they're just pretty to look at on the page. The lace patterns, on the other hand, are pretty damn droolerific. I can totally see myself making this:

It's "A Christine Duchrow Lace Centerpiece" adapted by Charlene Schurch. It's just so complex and pretty and uses thread with 1.5 mm needles... oh heaven! I would consider making this as a blanket in a thicker yarn with larger needles, but there's something about the ornateness and uselessness of doilies that really appeals to me. There are also a considerable amount of lace edgings, but I think I'll probably also try these squares by Mary Walker Phillips... maybe make a baby blanket out of them. I especially like the leafy pattern.

Anyway, that's all for my adventures in magazine land. I'm seriously considering getting a subscription to Piecework because I enjoyed this one so much, but I probably won't for the afore-mentioned reasons. Ah well...

A couple of FOs

2010-04-19T19:41:00.000-07:00

Hello internet... I've been a terrible blogger, I know. Suffice it to say that I've been busy and/or uninspired. Even now, I won't be writing about what I had planned, which was to talk about my crazy bathroom disaster, and to show off my pretty new magazine. Alas, these will have to wait until I'm at home, and not procrastinating at school where all my pretty pictures aren't. Instead, I'll write about a couple of finished objects (FOs)...

First off, an object of wonder and awe...

If you just said to yourself, "Holy shit! That bitch is crazy!" I totally don't blame you. Yes, this is a giant granny square with a gazillion rounds. I used up the rest of the fluffy white and green stuff and pretty much kept crocheting until I ran out. I ran out of green long before I ran out of white, but I like how that border looks.

It's a very cozy blanket, and surprisingly soft and light for something made out of acrylic (I think). Mostly, I'm just glad to be rid of those giant rolls!

The second recently-completed project is this adorable little tote bag, made from Estelle Young Touch, a sport-weight mercerised cotton. This yarn is very slippery and splits easily, and it was difficult to find a pattern that it would work with. Turns out the Elisa's Nest Tote fit the bill.

The only modification I made to this pattern was to do a row of double-crochet around the opening of the bag before putting the handles on. The cast-on and bind-off edges were definitely of different sizes (because I bound off too tightly, I think), and so I wanted to even it up a little. Here's a WIP shot:

My favourite part of the pattern was definitely those applied I-cord handles. Such a cool technique, and such a pretty finished product! I wasn't extremely happy with this project until I put those handles on. And the fact that I badly twisted one of the I-cords before sewing it up doesn't really bother me so much. However, if I were to make this again, I'd probably do a crocheted base and then knit in the round for the body of the bag. Seaming sucks.

And they called me crazy...

2010-03-21T19:49:00.001-07:00

Over the last week or so, we've had absolutely gorgeous weather... Like, sunny, go-outside-in-a-tshirt gorgeous. And then yesterday, it snowed. Just a little bit, but enough to tell us that summer hasn't actually arrived. And what does this have to do with my mental state, you ask?

I just finished knitting a neckwarmer from that gorgeous yarn I picked up at the Creativ Festival last fall. Of course, everyone was all like, "Why are you making a super warm and amazingly soft neckwarmer when winter's already over?" And I was all like, "Oh, you'll see!" And of course, winter came back. So there... not crazy.

Anyway, my new gorgeous neckwarmer is amazingly warm and soft, and it cuts the wind like nothing else. Just having this little piece of fabric around my neck has made the difference between me being a shivering mess and toasty warm. Alpaca, in case I had any remaining doubts in my mind, is definitely my favourite fiber. Or at least merino, alpaca and silk blends... Here are the pics!

Aw yeah... just look at the fuzziness! You don't even notice the spot where I accidentally cut the fabric after removing a button when I realized it was on the wrong side... I mean... what mistake? (Ouf, talk about heart attack and a half!)

Currently on the needles is something equally unseasonable, a wool cabled sweater. This thing has been in my queue forever... and I've had the yarn from before I got my swift, in fact, I think it was last August! And since I bought that yarn specifically for this project... that's a long time for it to be in my queue. Right. So, the pattern is the Cable Luxe tunic by Lion Brand. I'm more than half done the yoke cable, and then I've just got to knit the rest of the sweater... Here's a detail of the cable pattern:

Ain't it perdy? I made a mistake in the first pattern repeat, and of course didn't notice it until I was finished the second pattern repeat, but I think I'll leave it there since the thing is seamed in the back. I think I'll also work the body and sleeves in the round instead of flat because I really really don't like seaming. Shouldn't be too hard to figure out...

A frabjous weekend!

2010-03-09T07:34:00.000-08:00

This weekend, which will include Monday just because I didn't get any work done yesterday, was awesome. A few friends were visiting from Ottawa to see a Muse concert, and as a result, there was much partying. Besides the necessary boozage, there were a few interesting items of note, namely a walking tour of the seedy parts of Toronto, a lecture by the author of one of my favourite web comic artists, and a drawing session with a pretty belly dancer. Ok, the last two had nothing to do with my friends from Ottawa visiting, but bear with me.

First of all, the walking tour. Of the group of friends who were visiting, there was only one female, and we shall call her L. L didn't want to walk around aimlessly all day on Sunday and so picked up the NOW magazine and discovered a teeny tiny add for a walking tour entitled "Blind Pigs & Card Sharks". It was led by a novelist named Lisa Pasold, who spent a lot of time promoting her book, but who was otherwise an excellent tour guide. We started at Union station, where we learned it was built in 1922, but not opened for five years after that because they had to reroute the train tracks. We then went through the Royal York Hotel, which is absolutely gorgeous, and learned that it opened right before the stock market crash of 1929, but was still a place of absolute luxury and class.

We then walked along Front street until just passed Yonge, passed the Hockey Hall of Fame and through Berczy Park, then up Church street to King. On the way, we learned all about the more disreputable life in Toronto in the 1920s to 1940s, about prohibition, the gambling, and the poor neighbourhoods. We then went back up Yonge towards Queen and passed by the King Edward Hotel and through Cloud Gardens Park, which was probably my favourite part of the tour. I'll have to go back there for a picnic. The tour ended at Old City Hall. Overall, the tour was really fun... I'd love to do that sort of thing again.

The next exiting event was a lecture by the author of PhD Comics, Jorge Cham. It was quite entertaining, but a lot of it might have been because the audience, which was 99% grad students, was so ready to laugh. The comic is about the lives of a few engineering grad students, with a token Humanities student. It's all about free food, being terrified of one's supervisor, the "graph"... for the most part I can really relate. Jorge's talk was mostly about how Procrastination is a natural mechanism for grad students to cope with the stress of being in grad school and all the expectations that come from that. It was a good time.

Finally, last night, I dusted off my sketchbook and went to a Dr. Sketchy session at Cameron House. And by "dusted off my sketchbook" I mean that my last drawing was done in July, 2008, and the last one before that was done in September, 2005. Anyway, I went with my friend Jori, who is a much better artist than I. The lovely Samara was modeling, and though she was pretty good at it for her first time, I found her poses to be a little uninteresting. I think she made up for it with her gorgeous belly-dancing costumes. To finish off, here are a few of my sketches:

(One-minute poses)

(Five-minute poses)

(Ten-minute poses)

New socks... for me!

2010-02-27T08:36:00.000-08:00

So, I've knit socks for my boyfriend and for my dad, but never for myself. Well, my time has come! And I'm happy to report that small feet are way better to knit for than big manly ones (sorry guys).

The socks I'm knitting for myself are the Monkeys by Cookie A. According to Ravelry, these socks have been knit 11359 times, though it's probably even more if you consider all the knitters who aren't on Ravelry, or who don't record their projects as obsessively as some of us. The point is, it's a very popular pattern, and of course, there must be a reason for that!

I'm done one sock, and about half-way through the second, and I found the pattern flows from my needles with ease. The lace pattern is super easy to memorize, and with my teeny feet, it seems like it takes little time for the sock to reach an appropriate length. Based on the amount I was able to knit during at 1-hour lecture yesterday, it takes me maybe an hour and a half to do one pattern repeat.

As you can see, I modified the pattern so that the sock has a short-row heel instead of the heel flap. It just seemed like the short row heel would be easier, and to be honest, I prefer how it looks. I have yet to try a heel flap, but that will have to wait for another sock. I didn't modify the pattern other than that... I made the large size (to accommodate my massive ankles), and used the recommended number of pattern repeats.

The yarn I'm using is Araucania Ranco Solid in the Russet colourway that I got from WEBS for pretty cheap. I just love that bright red colour! I think it's my favourite sock yarn to date, though my experience is clearly limited. It just changes colour so subtly and prettily... It's also fairly soft and feels pretty sturdy.

I'll probably post some more pictures when the second one is finished. Yay! Socks!

Gifted yarns

2010-02-17T05:52:00.000-08:00

I've said it too many times, but sorry dear blog for letting you languish without new posts for so long. I've been terribly busy (and lazy), and to be fair, I haven't really done much in the way of craftiness lately. But one thing I should mention is all the beautiful yarn I recently acquired from a friend of mine... This friend is the girlfriend of the drummer from my old band and she's known as spookycrisp on Ravelry. I had told myself that I wasn't going to buy any new yarn before I finished up the projects in my queue... but you know, free yarn doesn't count. I'll just show you my absolute favourites because she really did give me a lot...

Now for the yummy yummy yarns... First up, some Koigu Painter's Palette Premium Merino (boy that's a mouthful) in a lovely mixture of green colours. It's a fingering weight yarn in pure wool, so I may or may not make a pair of socks with it... depends on the yardage. I just found out that a friend of mine is pregnant however, so this might become (part of) a cute little baby jacket!

Next up, some squishy soft Malabrigo Merino Worsted. I got four skeins, and so I have enough of this to make a small sweater. The main contender right now is the Painted Lady pattern from the Anticraft.

I've always wanted to try Noro, and so I also brought home one skein of Kureyon sock and another of Silk Garden sock yarns. I'm not entirely sure what these will become. But look at the pretty colours!!

Finally, I just had to grab this skein of Oberlyn Stella, a worsted weight mix of alpaca, cashmere and merino... seriously the most luxurious yarn I've ever owned. The only thing about it, is it's white... very very white. Verging on really boring. So I think I'll try my hand at Kool-Aid dying! I've bought a couple of packages of ice blue raspberry lemonade, and we'll see where it takes us! This excellent article from knitty will help me along, I'm sure.

So that's it for now. Hopefully I'll be able to show some restraint and actually not buy any new yarn before I've finished knitting all these projects... Famous last words!

Kitchy Crochet

2010-02-05T14:34:00.000-08:00

So a few weeks ago, I did say that I would talk about some crochet books I got over the holidays. Unfortunately, school has been keeping me busy (what with us having to get a scientific paper out by the end of the month), but I'm suffering from an incredible sugar low and wouldn't be able to do any work anyway... Two nanaimo bars is too many nanaimo bars.

So, my parents' cleaning lady gave me these books (more like booklets really) because she figured she would never use them. She crochets, but nothing terribly complicated I suppose. Book #1 is called "Learn to Crochet" by Susan Bates, I guess. It dates from 1979, and boy does it show!

The patterns aren't terrible, I suppose. My main beef with them would be that they're all crocheted flat, when a better result could have been achieved in the round. There are some very nice baby items, and I particularly liked the blankets.

The sweaters, however, are really dated. I suppose the vests aren't too bad, but I couldn't see myself making them. Maybe to be ironic?

The second book is a whole lot more fun. It's an issue of "Decorative Crochet Magazine", published in 1990, featuring doilies! I don't know what it is, but I have a bit of an obsession with doilies. I can hardly justify making them (I only ever made one for my pet bamboo), but they're fascinating. Maybe it's something about these circular intricate patterns with teeny tiny thread and hooks... Whatever it is, I can't get enough of them.

I mean, this must take forever! But so pretty...

And look at those stitch diagrams!

However, even I am not crazy enough to tackle this:

I mean it's still thread crochet, and each of the motifs looks like this:

Maybe I'll get to a giant doily one of these days, but I have a long list of things to do before that (most of those I already have the yarn for). Currently, I'm working on another giant granny square blanket (it's already 5 feet across!), this garter belt, and these socks. I knit most of this scarf, and then frogged it. It wasn't the fault of the pattern... It was just the wrong pattern for the yarn I was using... oh well.

Winter, how I hate thee!

2010-01-29T06:39:00.000-08:00

I've been living in Canada all my life, so you'd think I'd be used to the terrible winters by now. However, even after 23 years, I can truthfully say that they still suck. This winter has been particularly strange. It seemed to take forever to get here... the first week or so of December was still in the balmy 10-degree range (that's Celsius, in case there are any american readers out there), but when the first real snow arrived, the temperature dropped 20 degrees overnight. It literally went from fall to winter in one day. No gentle, gradual slope for us!

We're currently going through a deep freeze here in Toronto, which is strange since we had a small thaw at the beginning of the week, with temperatures going up above zero (and environmentalists running around saying "look look! proof of global warming!"). The high today is -15 or something ridiculous like that.

At least Toronto is warmer than Quebec, where I spent the first 22 years of my life. Torontonians call a foot of snow a lot, while in my hometown, if there were that much snow, we'd wonder when winter was actually starting. When I was home for the holidays, I took a few pictures of the winter "wonderland". It's quite lovely to look at... just not to live in.

Seriously... would you be able to tell the difference if these were shot in black and white? I'm seriously considering moving to southern California... or Barbados.

Christmas presents, part 3

2010-01-18T18:22:00.000-08:00

And now for the final installment of the Christmas knitting! (Well, I still have the boyfriend's present to show, but I haven't given that to him yet.) Also, this is my hundredth post! Woo! These two gifts were for my friend Em and Stevie's baby niece.

First, Em's present: a cake! I used Hannah Kaminsky's pattern Let Them Knit Cake. However, instead of a birthday candle, I decided to make a black forest cake with a ginormous cherry. For the cherry, I used the Cherries are da Bomb pattern by Marcie Nishioka.

I really like how it turned out. The icing looks almost good enough to eat, and the jam filling looks like its ready to squirt out from between the pieces of cake. I mean, it's obviously made of yarn, but if you squint, you might just think it's real!

Second, the baby's present: little booties! I used the One-Hour Baby Booties from Stitch 'n Bitch Nation. True to the title, they took me very little time. I'm not sure if it was an hour, but it certainly was less than an evening.

I used what I thought would be the tail-end of the James C. Brett Marble Chunky that I used to make my Cloud Bolero and slouchy hat, but it turns out I still have enough left over to make another pair! This pattern really takes barely any yarn!

Unfortunately, I probably made them a little too small for the baby. She's about 5 months old now, and her feet were just about popping out of the little slippers when she tried them on a month ago. Oh well... it was a fast pattern, and they're still super cute!

Next time, I think I'll talk about some retro crochet books I got over the holidays!

Christmas presents, part 2

2010-01-16T20:41:00.000-08:00

And now the second installment of the christmas knitting! Yay!

For my widdle brother, I made mittens. But not just any kind of mittens! Fancy convertible flip-top mittens! I knit the Lola Flip-Top mittens from 101 Designer One-Skein Wonders.

Of course, I made a couple of changes. Though the pattern called for a fingering-weight yarn, I used a DK weight yarn instead and I got gauge on the recommended needle size. Actually, I used Patons Astra, which was kind of squeaky, but otherwise a very nice yarn. I also fooled around with the sizing a bit, so it's somewhere between the largest size and the next down, so they fit my bro pretty perfectly. Finally, I used velcro patches instead of buttons to fasten the flaps because I figured my bro wouldn't think buttons were manly enough.

For my buddy Stevie, I made the Bokaclava by Anne-Marie Dunbar (blog here). I used some Cascade 220 Superwash and a little bit of leftover Red Heart Soft, which is probably one of the nicest acrylics I've ever used. Here, my brother kindly models it:

Dad had a pretty good time trying it on as well:

This was a really interesting pattern, but I wasn't thrilled about all the seaming. The ears were knit separately and then sewn on afterwards, and I would have preferred if the thing was knit in one piece. I do have to say that it was totally worth it for the final result though, which turned out really well. Here, Henry graciously offered to model it from many angles:

And now, since I'm falling asleep, I will bid you all a good night!