New Quilt: ICE!!

    One of the calls for entry for our fiber artists group 4 Common Corners was Snow and Ice.  I decided to take the nerdy approach for this piece again.  Ice has many many different crystal structures depending on what the temperature and pressure is.  Very few occur here on earth, but they occur in all kinds of crazy places in the universe like in giant ice planets and in the very upper reaches of the atmosphere where precipitation is nucleating.  Scientists are still identifying new crystalline forms for ice (including many that aren't even stable) and it's a really interesting area of research.  

    I decided my quilt should be based on a phase diagram for ice; phase diagrams depict the range of temperatures and pressures at which you find any particular compound in its solid, liquid, and gaseous forms, and it's especially cool for ice because it has so many different solid (crystal and amorphous) forms. There are quite a few different phase diagrams depending on what range of temperatures and pressures you're studying, but I decided to go with this one, from a 2019 Nature paper.

You can see the regions of the phase diagram where all the different forms of solid ice are found (labeled with roman numerals).  I wanted to fill each shape with some pattern abstracted from the different crystal structures of ice.  Most of the ice on earth is hexagonal ice, form 1h, seen over at the far left and its crystal structure is pretty straightforward.

When I started googling around to see what the crystal structures of the other forms of ice are, I found  Frank Hoffman's fascinating website.  He's an academic chemist and has a personal website/blog dedicated to crystal structures including lots of different molecular models for different ice crystal structures.  This first one is Ice IX and ice XV.  The second is one of my favorites, Ice II

I abstracted some cut patterns from all these different illustrations of ice crystal structures and then cut them out on my silhouette cutter.  At furst I thought I'd use the outline of the crystals, I guess you'd call it the positive of the crystal pattern, but there was too much white space so I decided to use the negative for this one, that is, what was left over from the cutting after I removed the crystal outlines. 

Stay tuned though, I saved these outlines to make a second piece with a similar design!  The fabrics are all ones I've handpainted or dyed over the years, mostly silk and polyester.  The background is some sort of white polyester with a slight shine to it.

You can see here  (below) the layout in progress with the "negatives" rather than the "positives" (above)

All the pieces were fused down- come back next week to see the quilting and the final piece!

I Like #276

 Welcome to another week of things to like!  

I had a good week this week!  My sister and her kids came up over the weekend and we had a great time.  We played lots of games and did some sewing and crafting, and my friend Brett worked with them on a geology scout badge.  

As part of the geology scout badge we went on a hike to hunt rose rocks, the state rock (crystal?) of Oklahoma.  They're these really cool barite crystals/rocks that form in the Garber sandstone which is our primary rock formation in this area.  The lakes are really low right now (it's been sadly so so dry) but that does mean that lots of beach is exposed so we found lots and lots of cool rose rocks.  These are just the ones I kept.  Alex and Anna collected bunches-  Alex filled up his pockets with tons and tons, he had to hold his pants to keep them from falling down.

Last weekend I tried to install a fan in my home office, but alas I discovered I needed a different junction box, and this weekend a friend of mine asked one of his friends who is an electrician to swap the junction box and hang the fan.  I'm very excited (perhaps unreasonably excited) because the room has always been really stuffy.

The weather has been beautiful temperature wise,  a bit rainy (thank heavens, finally).  It's meant more and more hand knits are coming out.  This week I got out the sweater I finished last fall.  It's another one some people have told me they think is ugly, but I really like it-  the yarn is lightweight so it's not super hot.  Apologies for the work bathroom mirror selfie, I promise no one else was in there and I don't have a full-length mirror at home.

This week's prompt from LeeAnna was costumes we've liked as a kid and an adult.  We had lots of fun costumes as kids, all made by my mom, but I don't have easy acess to many of the pictures. I love dressing up though, so I do have some favorite as-an-adult costumes.  I don't usually make ones that are too complicated, and I usually try to use all stash stuff if I can.

One year I was a jellyfish (very hard to navigate from room-to-room at the halloween party)

One year I went as a Lt.Cdr from TNG (I couldn't resist photoshopping myself onto the bridge)

One year I went as a fruit fly (can you sense the nerd theme?)

And just to close out, here's the cute spooky picture of the week!

I hope everyone is finding things to like this week!  Click over to LeeAnna's for more goodness!

Ribosome Sweater

 

Last December I found this pattern for a sweater I really liked called Ribosome    I liked the intertwined cable pattern on the surface and the slip stitch color work.  I've done several slip stitch color work projects lately and TBH I'm feeling done with that approach now, but I was all systems go a year ago.  

I wanted to use the orange alpaca yarn Melody and I hand hand-dyed last fall.  I liked the multi-color we dyed with it but I didn't think I had enough of the orange and multi-color for the whole sweater so I introduced a dark teal third color that picked up the teals in the multi-color.  I liked the way all the yarns looked together and they felt so wonderful to knit with.

I made a swatch and liked the way they looked.  The swatch was a little off-size from the pattern gauge so I went down a size in the pattern.

The yoke knits up first with short row shaping.

Then the body of the sweater is knit onto the yoke.  Spooky doesn't usually like to let me knit (he's too squirmy) but I loved this shot of him snoozing in my lap.

Knitting the sleeves was challenging-  I was playing yarn chicken with the dark teal because I needed enough for the cuffs.  It turned out I had enough green that I probably didn't need to have that solid orange block in the middle of the sleeves (I'd run out of the yellowy multi-color).  At least I was knitting both sleeves together on one set of needles (like I do with socks) so it was easy to keep them matching.  

Unfortunately when I finished the sweater a few weeks ago I absolutely hated it.  The colors looked garish and too bright even for me and they were not playing nicely.  

Even worse, it did not fit at all. It was huge, absolutely gigantic, and the yoke came down so far that the armpits sat like 8 inches below my actual armpits so my arms felt pinned.  I was really aggravated because it was a lot of yarn and nice yummy yarn too.  

So I did what you should never do with your hand knits- I tossed it in a hot load of laundry and then into the dryer.  I figured I was never going to wear it as-is so I might as well see if I could shrink it.

Well it worked like gangbusters!  It shrank up just perfect to fit exactly like I wanted with bracelet length sleeves and everything.  That's what I was going for to begin with but it was very hard to try on as I was working because of the ways that the sleeves were knit flat and both on the needles.

The other magical thing that happened in the wash was that as it felted, the colors got just a little blendier.  The orange is slightly softer, and the teal is slightly lighter.  The felted fabric is so so soft- it's amazing.  The sweater is super comfy-  I've worn it every day this week.  I've actually thought about trying to shrink another alpaca sweater I crocheted years and years ago that also came out huge.

I'm so glad to have "rescued" this sweater.  I hate knitting things I don't wind up wanting to wear-  it takes so much time and the yarn is so valuable.  I'm so unexpectedly thrilled with the end product.

And of course warm sweater season (which is only going to last a few days before we go back to 85 degrees) is associated with warm sock season, so I got out a pair of thick yummy knit socks I blogged about previously.

I Like #275

 Welcome to another week of things to like!  A short list this week, work is calling from the other room!

Our prompt this week from LeeAnna was what is/was our favorite Halloween Candy.  I loved candy as a kid and although now my tastes tend a more toward the savory I love it now.  As a kid I was very much a fan of the fruity chewy candy (skittles, starburst, gummys).  And now in recent years, the thing I get most excited for when the halloween candy starts popping up is actually the candy corn.  It seems like such a seasonal treat.  I know lots of people hate it, but count me as a fan.

I like having easy vaccine access! I got my flu shot and bivalent covid booster yesterday.  They said I might have a rough day after getting both together but so far I'm just a tiny bit achy.

I love my pups.  They're sad I've been working a lot lately but are loving and snuggly all the same!

I love my garden!  It's doing great right now.  This week has been chillier (delightful sweater weather and still warm in the day).  We had our first "freeze" and I was worried the garden would be hit but I think it only got to just 31 and it seems to have come through fine.

I like octoberfest beers!  My friend Brett and I are working our way through all the ones available locally trying to find our favorites!

And I like music!  Brett and I went to the OKC Phil this weekend-  it was all Viennese music ending with Mahler's 5th Symphony, which was wonderful.

Hope everyone has some things to like this week!  Head over to LeeAnna's for more!

I Like#274

 Welcome to another week of things to like!

This week LeeAnna's prompt was our favorite snacks!  Probably my favorite traditional junk food snack is Cheetos, but they're so bad for you and so orange I try not to eat them too often.  Lately I've been snacking on the crabapple fruit leather I made last year-  it was in the bottom of my refrigerator and I forgot about it for months.  I just finished all I had left and it was so good.  I'll have to make more next year.

Good things to like this week include the ongoing fall garden-  I was so excited to see both a bunch of bees in the garden and this beautiful monarch butterfly.  

And of course I love my puppies, they had a good snuggly week.  I woke up this morning to Spooky staring straight into my eyes-  it was both charming and a little disconcerting, he's usually curled up asleep next to me.

I love my fibery friends!  My friend Melody just came back from the Dallas Fort Worth Fiber Festival and she brought e these two delightful armadillo stitch markers! 

And I like getting time to sew!  I spent a while quilting/couching this weekend on a new quilt I'm working on and it was very nice.  This happy grasshopper somehow found his way in- I took him back outside by I think Spooky might have bothered him.

I also finished my 7th embroidery for Carina's Wheel of the Year Stitchery project.  I'm so pleased with how this is going.  There's one left and then it will be time for me to assemble them all.

I hope you're all having a good week!

Click over to Lee Anna's for more things to like!

I Like #273

 Welcome to another week of things to like! 

Lee Anna's prompt for this week is apples!  I grew up with lots of apple trees at my parents and they still have an orchard filled with fruit trees, many of which are apples.  I've talked to my mother several times this week and each time, she's been processing apples so the prompt is a timely one!

I have lots of fun apple-related memories, of making dried apples and apple sauce and apple butter and apple pie and apple crisp.  Peeling and coring and cutting out the worst of the worms, and the way your whole kitchen gets sticky when you're processing the fruit.  I really love having the (now remote) privilege of home grown fruit and hope my mom will set some aside for me. I think my favorite memory though might be when my mom sent me a care package during my first year of college and used apples as packing material inside the box!

The most exciting thing that happened this week is that my friend Brett and I went up to the Oklahoma Salt Plains to dig for hourglass selenite crystals.  It's part of a wildlife refuge and very soon lots of migrating birds will be coming including some pelicans!  The salt flats are really cool- the base layer is this brown iron-rich sandy mud, but there's this quick-forming thin layer of evaporative salt crystals that forms on top to make the undisturbed regions a bright white.  The selenite crystals are really cool, they seem to nucleate around sand, so most of the crystals have this wonderful hourglass structure.  They're very fragile but pretty easy to find and we had a really lovely time.

A few crafty updates this week too! Not so much things I did this week as things I realized I forgot to share that I discovered while cleaning out iphone pics this week. My neighbor Fernanda and her husband Paul recently had a little baby girl, so that of course meant a baby quilt.

And our choir director recently left our church and took a position at a new church so I made her a fun tote bag as a going away present.  I used some of my favorite star wars fabric and pulled out my embroidery machine to have some fun.

And we have started using three ring binders to corral our music at choir, so I made myself a delightful pencil case to keep in my binder.  It's so bright and colorful!

The pups had a good week too- they behaved themselves and got lots of snuggles.  It makes me giggle to see the way they sort of blend in to the sofa.

The dahlias are looking lovely, but unfortunately you can see some wretched disease has infected all the leaves.

I hope everyone is having a good week, and thanks to LeeAnna for keeping looking for the positive!