Wednesday, February 6, 2008

Maxwell cardigan


The Maxwell cardigan is now completed and has been passed to it's new home for baby-ifying. I've been pretty amazed at the response it's had around the maths department.
There were a couple of problems - the stranding wasn't quite as even as I would have liked, and particularly the last 'J' looked uneven to me. That might be just because I know where the mistakes are, so I'm tending to see them more. And it'll probably settle a bit once it's been washed a few times(particularly cos I didn't quite get round to blocking it properly).

The edges rolled rather more than I would like too, but I suspect this is more of a problem for trying to take good photos than it will be for actual wearing, when lying neatly isn't such an issue.
I'm a little concerned too that the yarn might not have been the best choice. I used RYC cashsoft, which feels amazing and I've been wanting to work with for a while, but I think from looking at the washing instructions that it might be a little delicate for use in baby clothes. So I'm hoping it wears well.


I wanted to say a little about the equations too(with assistance from Wikipedia):
The first is Gauss's law, and says that charge is the source of electric fields.
The second is Faraday's law. I'm not sure how you interpret that one really.
The third doesn't really have a name, but it says there are no magnetic monopoles. That is, there is no 'source' of magnetic fields like there are for electric fields.
The fourth is Ampere's law. The first term there, together with Faraday's law, imply that there are wave solutions to these equations- if I remember rightly, this was what first led Maxwell to suggest that light could be electromagnetic waves.
Some combination of the second and fourth one also explain the principle behind electricity generation - that you can create a current in a wire by passing it through a magnetic field.

So yes, they're pretty amazing. The cardigan itself is borrowed from Knitty's Devan design, which is nice, simple and elegant.
The baby in question is one of the Urminsky clan, so you can see more pictures over there, and hopefully we'll have some of Maxwell wearing the cardigan soon :o)

Hope y'all like it :o)
Hugh.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Very cute! I can't pretend I'm clever enough to understand the maths though...give me linguistics stuff and I'll be happier! Was it fiendishly difficult to knit?

Jhadur said...

No, no, it's not hard at all! It's just stranded knitting with slightly more counting than usual-
You just knit along with two yarns, and knit each stitch with whichever colour you want it to be.
The tricky bit is making sure the spare yarn at the back doesn't pull the fabric out of shape, which you can see it kinda does here.

And yay comments :o)
Hugh.