So, the wheel, which I won (huzzah!) is an Ashford Joy. I wasn't trying to be coy about it, I'd just been planning a "here were the wheels I was considering" post and hadn't gotten around to it because I was too busy checking EBay every 10 minutes and trying to remove the spinning-wheel themed music running through my head. Now that that's all done with I can share more of my wheel-selection thoughts.

Here's what I was looking for in a wheel:

-I didn't really want a wheel described as a "beginner's wheel". First of all, I'm *not* a beginner, I've been spinning for nearly a year and the few spinners I've met seem to think I'm doing a good job. And as an engineer, someone enjoys and is pretty good at figuring out how things work, I'm not remotely concerned about sorting through a little complexity. And actually, this is the only thing I'm slightly disappointed about wrt getting a secondhand wheel--I was looking forward to getting a box full of wood and putting it together. (I must be the only person in the world that looks forward to going to IKEA because it means I'll be getting a jingly box I can turn into a TV stand.)

-I didn't want a traditional "Sleeping Beauty"-looking wheel. I'm not a fairy princess, my design aesthetic has no place for country charm or extraneous bobbles stuck on all over the place. (The thing that kick-started the wheel lust was a picture I saw online of a Louet painted bright orange. It was awesome.)

-I do have my own taste, though, even if it isn't a traditional one. Crazy leaning things like this, not so much. Electric spinners, not so much. The Babes, not so much.

-It's just as well I didn't want a traditional wheel, because I needed something that would fit in my apartment. Ideally, this meant a folding wheel, though some more compact wheels like the Majacrafts could have worked.

-I want be able to spin laceweight. I don't care at all about spinning bulky. I find this type of handspun so far from what I like that that site alone kept me from spinning for a good long time, because I didn't realize you COULD spin normal yarns.

-I was willing to spend a fair amount of money, but I am a grad student after all, so price is an object. I started looking at used wheels pretty early on.

What was left in the "within my price range new or used" list: the Joy, most of the Majacrafts, the folding Fricke, and the Jensen Tina.

My only reservation with the Fricke was that from the description I think the wheel has that wood-sticker stuff on top of it. Veneer is okay, but I hate plywood with woodlike sticker attached; you can never paint it or change it in any way, and it makes everything around it look cheaper. I'd rather they painted the plywood with a plain color, because as it is, their wheel is a stripped-down well-engineered piece of equipment, so they may as well make it look the part. And I was going to paint it black with red flames going around the wheel if I'd gotten that one anyhow, so not having to remove the fake stuff would have tipped the scales for me. I love the range of ratios, the wide single treadle, the very simple-yet-stable looking folding mechanism, and the great price for a new one. I came very close to buying one.

The Majacrafts are gorgeous, just gorgeous, but I got the feeling that I'd need to wait around for a while until a used one in my price range came up. If a Little Gem had come up first I would have that instead, probably.

There was a woman spinning on an Ashford Joy at a the spinning group I went to the weekend before last, and I really liked it. It looks quite different than the "stick in the middle" design of the other wheels I was looking at, and it seems like that design will be more stable when I move it around. It's about as compact as I could hope for (it'll fit into carry-on airport luggage), while also being something I don't think I'll grow out of for a long time. The Ebay price was right. I think it's a good choice for me.

Oh my god, my internal DJ needs to quit it with the Blood, Sweat, and Tears already.

(The auction for the wheel ends tomorrow.)

And of course, it makes perfect sense that the day you write a long thing about not buying a spinning wheel, you come home to a bank statement that says you're practically bursting at the seams with filthy lucre, which means you really have no choice but to put a bid on that wheel you'd been eyeing on Ebay.

Meep.

Wheel avoidance techniques:

Free/inexpensive:

1) Ordering catalogs. This gives one the satisfaction of knowing something will come in the mail and of having contacted a company you like, without involving all that pesky "money" the young people are so obsessed with these days. For an info-hound like me, getting a catalog that lists things like exact dimensions and what materials everything's made from has made me something just shy of a gearhead. Cons: I don't think there are any more I can sign up for. Also, I might end up on mailing lists sorted by demographics. When I start getting coupons for Preparation-H in the mail instead of "opportunities" to consolidate my student loans, I'll know it's happened.

2) Window shop on Ebay. Like a catalog that changes every day. It's fun to see what modifications people have made to their wheels, all the different styles, and how many people buy 500$ things and then store them in a basement for 10 years. There's also an incredible number of people with no spinning knowledge who put up antique spinning wheels, which they confidently say "work perfectly!!!!", when it's obvious even to me that it's missing every important part except the wheel itself, which is warped. I've since figured out that "works perfectly!!!" means "The turny thing turns." Unfortunately for me, wheels (the ones that do work perfectly, that is) retain a good part of their value, so the EBay wheels are not so much cheaper that I can buy one straight off.

3) Finding every scrap of spinning information. See previous reference to me being an info-hound. While inexpensive, this has not been nearly as satisfying, because now I want to try all this stuff I've been reading about and most of it isn't spindle-friendly. (Mostly I want to be an engineer and play with all the gears.) Also, I've learned just how much faster a wheel spins up fiber, and non-ignorance is non-bliss.

4) Dreaming about spinning every damn night. It's wonderful and fun while I'm sleeping but I fear I'm setting myself up for frustration.

5) Flit from thing to thing like an indecisive hummingbird. I've been making a lot of sample skeins lately--mixing colors, spinning from rolags, Navajo plying, processing raw fiber, making balanced singles, spinning something that isn't laceweight. This is something I suspect is more easily accomplished on spindles, because it's less problematic to stop and start while figuring out details. This is related to:

6) Do things I know will be harder on a wheel. Which includes playing, but also spinning fine and portably.

7) Have your husband lose the debit card to your joint account when you don't have a backup credit card. Not recommended, though it does put a damper on spending.

Things that cost money:

8) Hang out with spinners. I went to a spinning thing at the Sow's Ear last weekend, and enjoyed watching people with their wheels. Being the only one on a spindle made me feel a bit like a drummer (you know, the guy that hangs out with musicians?) but I got a much better idea of what I do and don't like just by seeing the wheels in person. Although, I was able to see in person how much can get spun on a wheel in a few hours. Hot diggity, I can't wait for that. Another 'helpful in an unhelpful way' situation. Also, there are almost zero local spinners; there were a good number of people at the social, but almost all of them were from at least an hour away from me. Guess I'm not going to be able to find a more local cluster.

9) Buy fiber: It's cheaper than a wheel, it suits my goofing-around mood, and I'm sampling to decide what I want to spin a sweater's worth of when I DO buy the wheel. Discovering that Halcyon Yarns allows you to buy only one ounce of fiber if you wish was a boon in this respect. At most places the minimum fiber purchase is 4 or 8 ounces, which is a LOT for me (the last few weeks of heavy spinning, I've done *maybe* three ounces). Interestingly, this is the total opposite to my knitting approach; I've always thought that buying a single skein of yarn for swatching was pretty dopey, but I'm really looking forward to having a bunch of fiber that isn't "for" anything.

10) Just buy the friggin' wheel already. So J says several times per week, but there are some life-things I want to have organized first, and the time gives me the opportunity to think things through. I'm watching EBay, I'm considering lace flyers and double treadles, I'm wondering if "wood grain finish" means that wood-wallpaper type stuff and if it does, if it's paintable. In short, I *like* thinking about different wheels, and once I buy one I really won't be able to think about another one. So this is fun for now.

The capoeira group I'm in had a performance last night that went pretty well--it was a small crowd, but I performed in front of other people for the first time, and I felt like it was one of my best games, too. Very fluid and natural.

The performance was at a park near a boating spot, so after that we went out on the pier and had a little roda. It was a perfect spot to play--a perfectly-sized semicircular paved area, edged by rocks for some excitement, with benches lining the flat part of the semicircle for the musicians to sit. There was a breeze off the water and a view of the Capitol. Lovely.

But not lovely enough to prevent my from cracking my head on the pavement TWICE in EXACTLY THE SAME WAY in one game. I was doing the move you can see J doing on the top of his page right now, and was sort of lowering my head down from a curled up handstand (if you can picture that same thing but only on hands, it was like that). Both times, my head came down too quick--I think it's because I'm used to practicing on the carpet in our living room--and I thunked myself pretty well.

The second time, I paused in that position for what felt like a very long time, breathing, making sure I was whole, and verifying that yes, I did the same stupid thing twice in the space of about two minutes. And then I kept playing, but gently. What amazes me is that I was able to get my bearings with my feet in the air, and none of the thoughts running through my head were that I was going to fall over.

Today I've got a little egg just far enough under my hairline that I can't see it. It's tender but not too bad. My neck is a little more sore, actually, I think because it absorbed most of the blow. I feel very tough.

A friend of mine from college had a baby recently, and I've been working on a fishy baby blanket for her off and on. I like the pattern. It's good for leftovers or single balls of "what can I do with THIS?" type of yarn, and the individual pieces go pretty quick, only 40 or so minutes per piece. There was one row of the pattern that was obviously off (it was a cut and paste of the previous right-side row, but you'd decreased in the meantime), but it was pretty easy to fix. The only other thing I did that wasn't written was to leave LONG tails so I could use them to sew the fish together. I learned this after the last baby blanket I made, when if the tails weren't long enough I used a new length of yarn, with even more tails to weave in.

My original plan was to knit half blue fish and half brightly colored fish, which I thought would make it look like the bright fish were swimming on a watery background. Now that I'm to the point of sewing it up it doesn't really look like that, but it does give the impression that I had SOME sort of plan.

Last night I finished the last fish and actually laid everything out to decide what arrangement looked best. The digital camera was a big help here, because I set things up 4 or 5 different ways and took a picture of each arrangment. Not only did it allow me to directly compare each setup, but the tiny digital camera screen gave me a better overall impression than I could get just by standing over it--it was the equivalent of looking at it from across the room, which is hard to do when something is in bits on the floor.

What I realized was that randomly arranging things just felt TOO messy and random. I thought of my poor unfinished flower quilt, and how much I liked the light-to-dark progression. The arrangement I decided on was a sort of inverted light-to-dark scheme. From the top down, the blue fish go from dark to light, while the colorful fish go from light to dark. Having them all go light to dark just didn't work for some reason, and there are too few units to get any fancier and do a kind of corner-to-corner progression like on the flower quilt. It gives the blanket a bit of coherence while still being a bright happy baby thing that cheerfully clashes with everything.

There's one lonely fish that will not join the school; the yarn was different and she came out too small to fudge with blocking. I think I'll work her into the wrapping, since my friend is the crafty type that loves little things like that. I might also make an extra-small one with fingering-weight yarn I have around, partly because I've been thinking about how fun it would be to make a teeny fish.



When I made socks for my cousin, I also made this hat for her husband. It might look familiar because I made another one a while back. It's the Brioche Helmet Hat from the Fall 2005 Interweave Knits. The pattern was only offered in children's sizes, and I wanted to make one grownup-sized.

To upsize it, I looked at how many stitches' difference there were between the small and medium size and increased by that amount for the large size. My hope was that this would keep things proportional. For example, the small hat was (if I remember correctly) 56 stitches around, the other hat was 64 stitches around. So I made the large hat 72 stitches around. And I did the same thing with the earflaps, doing one extra set of increases.

It came out pretty well. It was a smidge loose--brioche stitch being as stretchy as a great stretchy thing. I wouldn't mind knitting another one, though I'd make the earflaps a bit deeper for someone with hair.

I ordered 100mg of a chemical last week (which goes a long way when you're doing surface stuff), and it came perfectly packaged in the tiniest bottle I've ever seen. Thing looks like a pickle jar for a field mouse.

Note to chemical manufacturers: cuteness counts.
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This was my garden last week. I thought I was catching it at its height--no mature fruit yet, but tons of buds and vines and beautiful green mess.

Well, garden showed me. The vines in the middle and on the right side now extend well above that string that goes across, there are some veggies (grape tomatoes, green and wax beans) that are ready to eat tonight, and there's more on the way. And by "more on the way", I mean, "If I go mysteriously silent in about 2 weeks, it means that two potted plants are capable of drowning an adult woman in grape tomatoes. Send basil."

The first academic paper with my name on it is coming out in the next few weeks--it's available as a proof at the moment, and I sent a copy to everyone in the family. I'm second author on it, but it's only second of four (in my lab an average paper has 10 or 12 coauthors on it), and I did a lot of work on it, so I'm all excited about seeing figures I spent way too long perfecting with Photoshop.

Since the paper's out so I don't need to worry about our getting scooped, and since my research has since veered in a completely different direction, I thought I'd talk about what we did, because it was pretty neat.

Imagine you have a material covered in well-mannered bumps, like this:



(note, these aren't the actual images that I spent hours perfecting, I'm simplifying things.)

You've made sure that it looks just like this, not wavy like a sine wave or anything crazy like that. Once you have the surface, you want to paint some areas one way, and other areas another. You're fairly sure that you're painting it to look like this*:



But you can't tell for sure. Why not? Each one of those bumps is 100 times finer than a human hair. You need to make sure the surface looks like this if you want to actually do some interesting stuff, but the techniques used to make sure that the texture, or topography, can only tell you that the surface still has that topography. You'll need a different technique to figure out if the tops are different than the sides and bottoms, as you want them to be.

Fortunately, you have a technique that can measure the average color of the surface from a variety of angles. If you set this measuring device so that it's looking straight down at the surface:



Then the device averages what it sees over a pretty large area, and the computer registers it as a mixture of green and red.

If we set the device at an angle that's almost paralell to the surface, a glancing angle, what will the average color be?



It can't "see" into the the grooves (or at least, not very far into the grooves), so it registers the average color as red.

By doing some computer modeling, we can figure out what percent of that brownish color is actually green, and we can pull out a graph that shows the change in % green dependent upon the change in angle:



By using yet MORE computer modeling, we can figure out what the graph above would look like if the surface were perfect and compare the two. We found that the predicted graph looked very similar to the actual graph, so we know we have just about what we wanted to have in the first place. Phew.

Of course, the actual setup is more complicated than just "red" and "green". For one, each area is composed of more than one "color", and some of them are shared between the two areas. So we needed to start out with a surface that was flat, pure, one-or-the-other so we had something to base the predictions on. Also, due to some quantum physics stuff I won't get into here, the spectrum changes when you change the angle, so imagine that the "red" area is purple when you hit it at a glancing angle, and the green goes blue at a glancing angle. This means that even though the sides and bottom are all the same material, what they contribute to the overall spectrum is going to be quite different.

But it's a neat technique, and hopefully a useful one for spectroscopists.

*Joe and any other colorblind people that might be reading this: the top is red, the side and bottom is green, the first "computer screen" is a muddy brown, and the second "computer screen" is plain red. I only thought of this after I finished the entry, sorry about that.

I'm working on a vest right now that is progressing rapidly. When I finish with that I'm going to start up work on a cotton sweater for J, so I've started doing some pattern-hunting.

He's given me a pretty good idea of what he was looking for in a sweater, so I poked through some online patterns and sent him a few links. Nothing really struck his fancy, so I went through my books and magazines at home. As soon as he saw this:



I could tell by the look on his face that no other pattern would do.

"Could you knit me a pipe, too?"

The pattern is from a vintage (obviously) raglan sweater booklet. There's a bunch of good stuff in it--many different methods of construction, some interesting stitches for the easily bored, patterns for children and men and women. Although the poses are pretty dated, the patterns are all classic or very easy to modernize. For example, I'll be knitting a narrower neckband than what's shown above. A detail I like on this sweater is that the ribbing is actually a slip-stich rib, which gives it a slightly different look and gives me a little novelty.

The only change I'm considering, besides the neck, is the ribbing at the bottom and cuffs. I'll have to swatch it, but I think the ribbing pattern in the body should be enough to prevent curling. Since it's going to be a cotton sweater, I don't want there to be an indented edging that gets all saggy and odd.

My only concern is knitting an entire sweater in black cotton. Ye gods.

Local people: I just got an email about Nano Cafes, which are being envisioned as an opportunity for non-scientists to discuss the societal implications of research with Actual Scientists. If you're interested in nanotech, or (maybe especially) if you're afraid of it, I'd highly recommend going. I'll probably be there, though not in a formal capacity.

As a, er, nanotechnologist (not a real word just yet, but appropriate enough), I often get asked about a recent scientific development that was on the news, or how my research applies to everyday stuff, or even just what scientists do all day. It's interesting to me that even in an academia-heavy town like Madison, there are lots of people who have never met a scientist, and who have lots and lots of questions.

Frankly, I feel like this is the sort of thing I should be doing all the time, to everyone, every day. There are scientists doing amazing, important work, but who can't explain it in terms that a curious well-read layperson can understand. I can do that. I'm *really good* at that. I LOVE doing that. I need to find a job that lets me do that. I see stuff like this and realize just how much the usual Ph.D tracks are just not for me.

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A pair of socks for my mom's cousin. I finished these a few weeks back but I wanted her to get them before I put them up.

Oftentimes, you'll see sock knitters refer to a pair of socks done in self-striping yarn as either "identical" or "fraternal" twins. Identical twin socks are, well, identical, started at the same point in the striping sequence so that they exactly match the whole way up. Fraternal twin socks, while made from the same yarn, don't match up. If the socks have a short repeat I don't bother trying to match anything, but for self-striping patterns that repeat less than every 4 or 5 rows, I try to have the stripes show up in the same places but without concern for the color order. If the stripes aren't roughly in the same place, I notice my feet more, so doing it this way keeps me sane.

If you look carefully, you'll notice that these socks are somewhere in between identical and fraternal twins. The stripes come up in the same place, and the blue stripes match up perfectly (look, for example, at the blue stripes that form a Y around the heel), but the red and yellow stripes are inverted. This is because I started knitting the second sock from the opposite side of the ball to the first one, so the striping pattern was reversed. I didn't specifically plan on the blue stripe being identical on either side, I just knew the pattern would be inverted, and got the stripe going in the right place.

I like how it worked out. It gives the effect of planned quirkiness, which is just right for my cousin.

Spinning, spinning, spinning.



Left side: One ply of white merino, one ply of the light blue roving from Blackberry Ridge. I'd spun both of these up a while back, and last week when I was looking in the bag o' singles, I noticed that the weight and yardage was about the same. So why not?

It's about 50 yards in total, and about 11 wraps per inch, making it a little thicker than the blue yarn I spun. It's not so far off that I couldn't put them together, though. A little scarf or gloves to go with the hat, which mixes this with the blue might be all right.

Right side: Two-ply laceweight, sister to this skein. A little over 180 yards. This skein is more even than the first one; it's only quite recently that I got the hang of spinning fine without fighting the roving. It really shows.

I love it, I love it, I love it. This is the whole reason I wanted to learn to spin--to have access to yarns that I would purchase if they sold them, but they don't, so I can't. I just can't get a good picture because it's the individual fibers that make it so nice, and my hands are too shaky. The starting roving can be seen here, as the color "cranberry". See how it's got a bunch of different colors in it? Those are sprinkled throughout the yarn, which gives it a lovely depth of color. It's a very different effect than you see with the handpainted yarns, which don't do much for me. (I'll admit something shocking here--I think about 90% of non-solid Koigu is ugly, ugly, ugly. Also Lorna's Laces, most of the yarn sellers on Etsy, Manos del Uraguay, and all the other overpriced stuff.) I like tweedy yarns, though, so I think I'l be buying a lot of multicolored roving.

I was recently at lunch with some coworkers at one of those Italian restaurants with the paper on the tablecloth and crayons in little cups. Because it takes up about 80% of my "non-essential thoughts" space in my brain right now, I drew a picture of a spinning wheel--in use, then folded up, then some yarn, then the wheel in use again.

And when the coworkers asked me what I was drawing, I told them about how I'm saving up for a wheel.

It's funny, how my interests are mostly cause for strange looks no matter where I am.

If I talk about my research with my knitting friends, they're disgusted because I work with tissue from cadavers, or horrified that I use instrumentation that costs millions of dollars. People on the bus probably just think I'm that crazy person that does stuff with string at this point. At work, the fact that someone in an nanobiotech lab is interested in a technology that became obsolete almost 200 years ago is cause for raised eyebrows.

Perhaps I should just wear this every day: