More than one Wug.

Hi folks.
I've got a strange little project to describe today. A psycholinguist friend was telling me about an experiment called the Wug test, the aim of which is to get children of various ages to form a plural of 'wug', a fictitious animal, among other things. You can see scans of the original images here. You can also buy merchandise, if you're that way inclined.
Aside from being pretty cute, they're fun little nonsense monsters, and they have the weird property that you're not allowed to talk about them in the plural. So, this is the plan -- I'm going to knit a Wug. Then I'll knit another Wug. Then I'll have two of them. I'll probably knit up one or two of the other monsters, which have the other plural sounds.
The patterns will be quick, simple, and prominently feature googly eyes, since they make everything cute.

This is in no way as weird as a psychology experiment having a line of merchandising. Geeks!
Hugh.

Sad news

Hi folks.
Sad news this post -- I've mentioned Knittiana here a few times. She was very ill for a long time, and had been waiting for a heart transplant. We just heard recently that she had died.
She was an inspirational and incredibly brave person, and she meant a lot to the folks in Edinburgh. If you're not an organ donor already, I'd urge you to read about it (here if you're in the UK, or Germany, the US, or Canada). It's a big step, but it's something you should know about before you decide one way or the other.

There'll be more to write about this later, but just now I just want to say that we all miss her.
Hugh.

The Knitter

Exciting news this time!
If you're a regular reader of "The Knitter" magazine, you'll know they do a feature in which they select a knitting group each issue and display a collection of their projects. This edition they've chosen City Knitty, so you can see some of us and what we're up to! One of my long-unblogged hats (the heart-hat, which uses some nifty maths/compsci trickery to convert a heart pattern into polar coordinates) was one of the projects, so it's now officially famous :o).
And since another of the featured projects was Madeleine's Helward's world I got an extra mention too!

Thanks to CK's Georgina for organising this!
Hugh.

Prime factors scarf

Right, new project!
This one follows on from the prime number scarf I made a few years ago, which I think was before I started this blog, so it doesn't have an entry here. It was a series of horizontal stripes, with a different colour to represent the primes.
My sister asked me to make a version of this which would give a times-table. I decided the best way to do this would be to pick a colour for each of the primes, and make horizontal stripes made up of the prime factors making up that number. From the prime factorisation you can then work out which numbers divide which, and many more number theoretic properties too.
It's not really viable to do this for *all* the primes, since there are so many, so I had to restrict this to primes under 12, since this is the usual limit for times tables (Is this the same everywhere? Maybe it's just a UK thing?), all other primes are then assigned one colour. So it's a kind of colour-coded version of Eratosthanes's sieve.

I think it might have been a better choice to say that not just primes over 12, but any number with a prime factor over 12, should be left blank, since this won't appear in the times-table at all. This would give a rather different effect - the first way means the colours get more broken up as the scarf progresses, as the larger numbers tend to have more distinct prime factors, so they colours are all mixed together. The latter way would be less cluttered, with the "prime over 12" colour coming to dominate quite strongly be the end.
Knitting-wise, this scarf involves rather a lot of stranded knitting, so I've been trying out the trick of holding yarn in each hand, which has been quite fun. The hardest part is that the number of strands varies, from just one up to three, so keeping the tension even is quite a challenge.

I should mention too, that I've just come across this counting pane design by the Wooly Thoughts folks, which seems to work along quite similar lines, although the factors they colour are not restricted to primes. Go look! Also check out their other things, they have *loads* of cool mathsy knitting projects!

Happy knitting everyone!
Hugh.

Unrelated geekery...

Hi folks! Haven't posted anything here for far too long -- I really need to get down to finishing off some projects. And taking photos of hats. So, should do some of that soon, but in the meantime I really wanted to post this.
It's a project of local geek Bob, and while it's not technically knitted, it is certainly geeky and extremely awesome:

This was a Triumph

Not much I can say about it other than "wow". So, wow!
And since I'm posting this, I should really put up a link to this too:

Huge success

Awesome, awesome craftiness. Enjoy!
Hugh.

Filet Dragon Shawl

Hey again folks, time for some more not-about-hats posting, and this time a rare crochet edition*.

I've been having an odd urge to try some filet crochet(Ravelry) - this is a form of crochet in which you work a square grid mesh, and produce a pattern by filling in some of the squares. This can make some amazingly delicate and beautiful lacy designs, and the complexity of some of the designs is rather epic. (I should give special mention to City Knitty's own Sarah Moore, who has some absolutely stunning filet doilies.)

So, I'm planning to make a filet shawl. This is rather a foolish and recklessly overconfident plan, since I only barely know how to crochet in the first place, and this is a rather large project. But still, a knitxxor's gotta do what a knitxxor's gotta do.
The project is based on Ursula le Guin's Earthsea books, particularly Tehanu, which I tend the think of as the last one, though that's not entirely accurate. I'd say everyone should read this, but since I still need to read the later books I may not be one to talk.

[This next bit is going to be pretty spoilery... ish.] At some point in "Tehanu", there's a song sung, which just comes up in passing:

Farther west than west
beyond the land
my people are dancing
on the other wind.

This relates to a folk tale which is told, that once, long ago, there was only one type of people, and they had wings. Over time, they learned to make beautiful things, and some of them loved these beautiful things, so they stored them up and built huge fortresses to protect and defend them. Eventually, spending all their time in their fortresses, these people stopped flying and lost their wings, and these people developed into humans. The other ones though, preferred to live wild and free, never owning or storing anything, they kept their wings and developed into the dragons.
This is (broadly) what the song is about, wanting to be away with your dragon ancestors, soaring over the ocean rather than labouring away hording stuff. Naturally I can't explain it as well as le Guin does.
[/spoilering]

...so, the plan is to make a shawl with a big dragon motif across the back, and a border with this folksong written across it.
I made some sketch of how this should be laid out, and I'm liking how it's looking. I've sketched up some charts too, but they still need some finalising. And I've made up some swatches and more or less figured out how the filet technique works(thanks Cynthia!), so now it's on to getting it done!
I'll try to post some of the sketches once I have the charts sorted, assuming I can get them into a format I can thumbnail properly.

Also, knitting in public day this week!
Hugh.

* - because a crochet hook can be just as pointy a stick as a knitting needle.

Cthulhu toy

I'd kinda forgotten about this one - I made a little stuffed Cthulhu toy for local geek, and knitter, Rachel, and her imminent Norggling(I checked, this is apparently the approved term). It was a little ad hoc project, made up of nice simple shapes and largely made up as I went along.

Design-wise, the arms and legs have little sloped tops made with short rows which allow them to attach nicely to the body, and I'm very happy with how these turned out. The head is the most complicated part, it is knit as a ball down to the mouth, then you knit a few i-cords to form the first layer of tentacles. After re-joining and knitting a few more rows, there are a second row of slightly larger tentacles. All of the tentacles have short rows included to make them a bit messy and disheveled, they naturally don't lie flat.
I did toy with the idea of making a mouth-pouch to fit in between the two rows of tentacles, so that he could 'eat' things, but I'm not sure how child-able that would be. I experimented with a couple of different kinds of eyes - I had planned to use amber teddy bear eyes, but these green cat's eyes somehow really suited him, so I stuck with those. The wings are based on the design from the Cupid Panda, and again I was very happy with how the 'feathers' turned out. I like too how spiky the tops of them look, it gives them a nice evil feel.

The thing I like most about this though is the way the proportions all came together. The wings somehow add a kind of balance to the whole thing, and there's something about the big limbs which makes it just very huggable. The big problem was that the yarn was really too thin for the needles, so that when it's stuffed it's a bit see through and looks a bit thread-bare.


So yeah, there we have a cute little Cthulhu, all ready to set about indoctrinating the next generation of geeklets(I do love the idea of geek children, growing up with all this kind of stuff just being *normal* :o) ). And best wishes to Rachel, to Norgg, and to their coming Norggling!

Hugh :o)