Here’s a little presentation from last year’s winners, to give you an idea of the types of research projects found at the fair.

 

 
I can’t wait to see what this year’s participants come up with.

Technical Specs:

• Yarn: Alchemy Juniper 100% merino
  • Autumn Ecstasy (Loopy Ewe 2010 Club colorway)
• Needles: US Size 0 47″ circular
• Pattern: Lacy ZigZag Mitts by Monica Jines
• New Skills: Perseverance
• Mods: I knit the lace pattern all the way around until I got to the palm, and added k2, p2 ribbing to the bind off

These mitts took less than 1 skein of yarn, so there’s enough left for a second pair.

***

I also finished the Burberry Inspired Cowl, which, while not an exact match for the one in the catalog, it is a classy little piece – just right for wearing under a nice coat.

Technical Specs:

• Yarn: Fleece Artist Sea Wool
  • Pewter (Cookie A 2011 Sock Club colorway)
• Needles: US Size 7 47″ circular
• Pattern: Burberry Inspired Cowl by Julianne Smith
• New Skills – Subbing yarns. The original pattern called for a bulky weight yarn, but the SeaWool is fingering weight. Held double, it made a great substitute, and I had only a few yards left.

This cowl turned out very well. I may have to knit one for myself. If I knit it again out of fingering weight, I would skip the kitchener bind off (now I know why I never used it on anything bigger than sock toes) and use a three needle bind off instead. I think it would be a little easier to manage with the doubled yarn.

***

Finally, I finished the Simple Pleasures hat, my first project using Malabrigo.

Technical Specs:

• Yarn: Malabrigo Sock (2009 vacation yarn from Loopy Yarnsin Chicago
  • Abril colorway
• Needles: US Size 6 and 7 24″ circular
• Pattern: Simple Pleasures Hat by Purl Soho

This was easy and quick, but knit in a luxurious yarn, makes a fantastic gift. And since I finished all of my Christmas knitting ahead of schedule, I can get a jump on selfish knitting month, or what the Muggles call January.

Here’s hoping all of your gift knits are finished, and that you all have a happy holiday season.

At Home: A Short History of Private Life

Bryson’s goal with At Home was to

consider the ordinary things in life, to notice them for once and treat them as if they were important.

Using his house, a former rectory in Norfolk, as a guide to private life, Bryson takes us through each room, including rooms that most homes no longer have (the scullery, drawing room, and dressing room, for example), to describe just how much life and homes have changed in the last several centuries.

Along the way, there are many familiar figures. Thomas Malthus and Thomas Edison, William Herschel, Charles Darwin and, for the anthropologists in the audience, V. Gordon Childe and Augustus Henry Lane Fox Pitt Rivers.  An interesting mix, and I learned things (about Pitt Rivers in particular) that never came up in my undergraduate history of anthropology class.

There were also interesting knitting-related tidbits. For example:

Sheep…were successfully manipulated to become the bundles of unnatural fleeciness we see today. A medieval sheep gave about a pound and a half of wool; re-engineered eighteenth-century sheep gave up to nine pounds.

And what did they do with these extra-fleecy sheep? Use the wool to make flocked wall paper that was attached with toxic glue. What a waste.

If you are curious about anthropology, history, or etymology (ever wondered where limelight, parlor, or room and board come from?), this is the book.

***

The second book for November was the biography of Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson. Rushed to print shortly after Jobs passed away, it is an unflinching look at the man behind Apple, describing his genius, his quirks, and his apparent lack of interpersonal skills.  While I enjoyed the Isaacson’s biography of Edison more, and think this book could have been improved if the original March 2012 release date had been kept, I feel the author tried to paint an objective portrait of Jobs.

***

As the end of 2011 fast approaches, and I’m taking December off from the book club to read holiday books to my kids, here’s a recap for 2011. I read:

• The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
• Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void
• Newton and the Counterfeiter: The Unknown Detective Career of the World’s Greatest Scientist
• The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements
• Life Ascending: The Ten Great Inventions of Evolution
• Long for This World: The Strange Science of Immortality
• Almost Chimpanzee: Searching for What Makes Us Human, in Rainforests, Labs, Sanctuaries, and Zoos
• Inside the Human Genome: A Case for Non-Intelligent Design
• Brilliant: The Evolution of Artificial Light
• At Home: A Short History of Private Life
• The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science
• Plastic Fantastic: How the Biggest Fraud in Physics Shook the Scientific World
• Remarkable Creatures: A Novel

Along with the last-minute add-ins:

• Mama, PhD
• Every Other Thursday
• Getting to 50/50
• The Ghost Map
• Bad Mother
• Provenance
• Steve Jobs
• All Wound Up

Fifteen books for 2011. Nowhere near what I used to read, but respectable. And I still have a few on the list to look forward to in 2012. Happy reading!

I started the project on an airplane (I’m starting a new job next month, and we had to fly out to look for housing). In between touring houses, potential daycares, and meeting with future colleagues, I worked on the hat a little more here.

Sidenote: If you’re visiting the Raleigh-Durham area and are looking for a centrally-located-but-quiet place to stay, Carol’s Garden Inn is great.

I made it through the ribbing, and started the top portion on the flight home. And the color is pretty true in this photo, even with the flash. The Malabrigo is just luscious.

I seem to be drawn to British detective stories this year. Provenance: How a Con Man and a Forger Rewrote the History of Modern Art, describes a con that fooled many experts in the art world for nearly a decade. I was hoping this book would have a bit a of science bent, like they would discover the forgeries through application of the scientific method. Not so much. Instead, curators of particular artists’ work (Giacometti) refused to authenticate the provenance of what later proved to be forged works. In Giacometti’s case, the artist’s wife had no recollection of a particular painting which had been put up for auction at one of the big auction houses, and so would not let the sale go forward.

Once art experts brought the contested works to the attention of authorities, they discovered John Myatt, the forger of the paintings, and John Drewe, one of many aliases used by the forger of the provenances.  Presenting himself as a physicist and patron of the arts, he ingratiated himself into the archives of some of Britain’s most famous art museums, where he falsified records to facilitate the sale of the forgeries.  A detailed account can be found at the Museum Security Network.  To this day, the art world doesn’t really know the extent of the damage caused by Drewe and his cronies, but maybe science could prove helpful here. Myatt told Scotland Yard that he had used a common house paint for many of his works. This type of paint was developed in the 1960′s, years or decades after many of the original artists had died.  Like any good detective story, Scotland Yard got the bad guys in the end, but I was outraged that Drewe was sentenced to only 6 years for essentially destroying part of the British historical record, and in the end only served two years of his sentence.

***

My second book for October turned out to be Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities, and Occasional Moments of Graceby Ayelet Waldman, mostly because it was the next e-book to pop out of my queue at the library.  I had put it on hold because the title sounded interesting, and as the mother of a teenager and a toddler, I certainly identified with the subtitle.  I was not aware when I reserved the book that the author had also written this piece for the New York Times, detailing why she loved her husband more than her kids, though I do remember reading it when it was published in 2005. A proverbial shitstorm ensued, including being attacked by the “good mothers” on Oprah. Bad Mother is a collection of essays that Waldman wrote, some for Salon, partly in response to the notion that there is one right, true way to be a good mother. While the reviews of the book on Amazon are critical, I think the book has value for what it is, a chronicle of one woman’s journey through motherhood. Some of the essays are funny, some poignant, some uncomfortable, but I believe collectively they represent a common experience.   Worth a read if you ever feel guilty because your kids wear disposable diapers, you bought their Halloween costume, and you ordered their birthday cake from Target.

***

Finally, I downloaded the Yarn Harlot’s new book, All Wound Up. I’ve read all the other books the Yarn Harlot has written, and this amusing little collection of essays was a welcome respite from school and work. I’m at that stage in the semester when actual knitting time is at a premium, which is to say, usually only possible if I get up before dawn on the weekend and manage to sneak out of the bedroom without waking the baby. But I can read about knitting while putting her to sleep at night, and I made it through All Wound Up in less than a week.  While many of the essays deal with the trials and joys of our craft, like this:

… while we know it’s an activity that’s great for our brains, to the uninitiated it may not look like we’re doing much. Well, not much except, at its best, [knitting is] a complex, repetitive, visual, spatial task that develops hand–eye coordination, enhances neural connectivity, and uses both hemispheres of the brain at once.

(No wonder so many scientists are also knitters); but there are also stories about being a wife, mother, and woman in contemporary society. The Yarn Harlot is not just for knitters, she is funny, honest, fallible, and able to laugh at the absurdity of modern life, like having to partially dismantle your kitchen to replace a dead washing machine, or rescue your husband from a parking indiscretion. I highly recommend all of her books, and her blog for that matter, for their consistent ability to give a good laugh.

***

There are two books on the slate for November, At Home: A Short History of Private Lifeand Steve Jobs.Happy reading!

I cranked out one and half repeats of the pattern this afternoon, while catching up on Season 6 of Dexter. With any luck I’ll have this finished by next week, and can start on project #4.

There are lots of other projects over at Tami’s Amis, if you are looking for a little holiday knitting inspiration.

The first is A Little Jazz, an elegant little ruffled scarf.

This is my first time knitting a scarf sideways (much more fun than the traditional way).  All the shaping is done with short rows, creating the crescent, and then the ruffle is formed on the increase row. After that, a couple of inches of garter stitch and you’re ready to bind off.

Technical Specs:

• Yarn: Madelinetosh Tosh Sock
  • 100% merino
• Needles: US Size 5 24″ circular
• Pattern: A Little Jazz by Samantha Roshak
• New Skills: Sideways scarf construction

The halfway done project is the Lacy ZigZag Mitts, which got stalled at the thumb gusset of the first mitt because I had no waste yarn at work.  The third project will be a cowl, and I’m leaning toward a shawlette for the fourth project, though I haven’t settled on a pattern yet.  I have 555 yards of Louet Gems fingering weight (100% merino), and am considering:

• Citron
• Reflections
• Coquille
• Mystery Medallion
• Sugared Violets
• Annis
• Peacock

Other potential pattern suggestions are most welcome, as are comments from those who may have knit these patterns already. How’s your Christmas knitting coming along?

Dr. Snow traced the outbreak through the neighborhood, documenting cases geographically to look for patterns.

To understand just what Dr. Snow was up against, consider this:

To build a case for waterborne cholera, the mind had to travel across scales of human experience, from the impossibly small – the invisible kingdom of microbes  – to the anatomy of the digestive tract, to the routine patterns of drinking wells or paying the water-company bills, all the way up to the grand cycles of life and death recorded in the Weekly Returns. If you looked at cholera on any one of those levels, it retreated back into the haze of mystery, where it could be readily rolled back to the miasma theory…Miasma was so much less complicated. You didn’t need to build a consilient chain of argument to make the case for miasma. You just needed to point to the air and say: Do you smell that? (p. 131)

From the data he collected, Dr. Snow was eventually able to determine that the factor common to all the cases was the pump where the households obtained their water, and was able to get the pump handle removed, thus possibly saving Soho from a second outbreak, when the father of the infant who was determined to be the incident case, also became ill and died. His wife, as she had when her infant daughter became ill, dumped the waste into the open cesspool in the basement of their home, thereby contaminating the pump a second time.

The Ghost Map is an interesting historical detective story, providing insight into the development of epidemiological methods for both the specialist and the general reader.

***

For October, I’ll be reading the first book I checked out under the new Kindle public library lending program, Provenance: How a Con Man and a Forger Rewrote the History of Modern Art.

What’s on your reading list?