From this discover.com article, courtesy of Noah:

[David] Henderson's method of constructing a hyperbolic plane involved taping together thin, circular strips of paper … Twenty years later, Taimina remembers, Henderson was still using the same tattered model. When she was assigned to teach his class on hyperbolic geometry at Cornell, where she had an appointment as a visiting professor, she was forced to confront it.

Stick by your words, domesticat.

Despite what Matthew will tell you, I'm generally a nice and polite person, especially in public. I let my hair down on this site more than I often do in face-to-face conversations, and every now and then I have to learn to live with the little lump in my throat that comes with speaking my mind.

You never know when you're going to fall in love. Well, I wouldn't so much call it 'love' as I would 'deep and abiding lust.'

Adrienne Vittadini. Cristina. Color #4. [photo of skein]

Any knitter who tells you that there is no such thing as 'crack' yarn is a lying sumbitch who is desperately trying to cover up his/her addiction. In this world, there are workaday yarns, yarns you use to construct beautiful but unfussy garments; garments that don't attract a moment's notice. Then there are yarns that, once spotted in a store, never leave your mind, quickly ascending ranks to the level of obsession.

This is a shawl salvaged from a pattern gone desperately, desperately wrong. We're talking "throw the unfinished project across the room and screech out loud" wrong. I'd started working this yarn in an Irish net stitch, which looks like a large series of interconnected X's with open areas in between.

Except I was working with yarn that was completely and utterly wrong for that stitch pattern, and I kept losing stitches without realizing it. By the time I'd worked up about nine inches' worth of shawl, I folded my work over and realized in horror that my knitting was getting smaller with every row.

I knew that I needed a shawl by birthdaybash weekend, and that I was running out of time. I resorted to one of the quickest and easiest openwork patterns known to knitters: k2tog, yarn over, repeat. Luckily, desperation made me knit fast.

"Good morning, this is Yarn Expressions.""Hi. I think I've got the weirdest question you're going to hear all day. My name's Amy…"

"Ah, yes. That ball of green yarn you bought yesterday afternoon is sitting here on the counter. You can pick it up at any time."

"I tore my car apart yesterday after I got home, looking for that yarn."

"Yeah, you probably wouldn't have found it in your car… If you hadn't called by noon we were going to call you."

"It's been sort of a long week."

"We all have those."

Proof positive that you get what you asked for:

Knitting in fishnets! All the cool goths knit Continental-style.

It was quite a trick, disguising the reddish-blond hair and eyebrows under makeup, wig, and borrowed clothes. (The things we do for dragon*conTV taping!)

Ok, they weren't all borrowed. The skirt, fishnets, makeup, and shoes were mine. The shirt was waaaaaaay too tight to even possibly belong to me. I don't know whose wig I was wearing. The little fingerless glove things cracked me up, but the black nail polish took a LOT of scrubbing to get off of my nails.

So that's me, fully-gothed and working on a baby blanket for Andrew & Joy. (Yep, that's 'blue ambition.')

If you missed the explanation of what "Blue Ambition" is, and why I'm knitting it, go back to the entry "Blue Ambition #1: grid up!" and catch up. I have a bit more detail to pass on now.

I took the week of Jeff's first week in San Francisco off, so that I could concentrate on the dragon*con tech staff work that was piling up, and thus I'm not as far along as I'd like to be. The good news is that I'm halfway through the knitting of the blanket.

I have enough yarn left over for one Sorceror's Stone / Chamber of Secrets - style Slytherin scarf. (Broad silver and green stripes, if you don't remember.) $20 will recoup my costs.

If you're interested, email me privately: amy (at) the site you're currently reading will reach me.

Quickie post, as I'm facing the pharmaceutically-enforced time limit of having taken my sleep meds. Finish the post quickly, Amy, or there shall be no post at all.The first round of Hogwarts scarves are knitted, finished, and mailed off; time to get back to the baby blanket. Andrew and Joy picked out two colors, and for the longest time I couldn't figure out how in the world I was going to make a simple striped blanket interesting. I wandered through my books of stitch patterns, looking for something that caught my fancy.

A roundup of links that have no real bearing whatsoever on anyone who isn't me, but which, when collected, bear a vague resemblance to a substantive post: Read the rest »