Me-Made-May Week 2

Here are the me-made items I wore this week:

• my blue tiered skirt 
• my Lady Skater dress
• my navy blue gathered skirt
• Geneva underwear (x2)
• my Washi dress (x2)
• my brown and yellow floral skirt
• my grey lace-edged sweater(I don't remember how many times)
• my Lofoten sweater (I don't remember how many times)

Me-Made-May Week 1

(Really week 1 plus one day, because it makes more sense for weeks to begin on Monday and end on Sunday.)

So far I've been successful in wearing at least one me-made garment each day.  Here's what I've worn so far:

• my damask skirt 
• my denim skirt (x2)
• my blue tiered skirt 
• my Lofoten sweater (x2)
• Geneva underwear (x3, obviously not the same pair)
• my brown and yellow floral skirt
• my grey lace-edged sweater (x3)
• my blue floral refashioned top (After I wrote that post about it, I went back and narrowed the front neckline so there's no chance of my bra peeking out)

A few things I've noticed so far: most of the clothing I've sewn for myself are skirts and dresses for warm weather.  I think I only have one re-fashioned top, and I haven't made any long pants or leggings.  This works well in my current location (I live in the hot humid South) but won't work so well once I move to the Midwest this summer, and have to deal with real winter.  

A green giraffe dress! With buttons!

My niece's favorite animal is the giraffe.  And she is currently fascinated with buttons.  She recently asked her mom for a green giraffe dress with buttons.  So they went to the fabric store to look for green giraffe fabric, but the closest thing they could find was a flannel with yellow giraffes.

It just so happens that I also love giraffes, and I happened to have in my stash a cut of fabric with green and blue giraffes on it, together with a coordinating polka-dot.

They became an Oliver + S Jump Rope dress.  I made view A, in size 2T with some extra length - I cut the bodice on the 3T line, and then added some more to the skirt length.  I think it was at least 2", but I wasn't super-precise about it and I don't quite remember exactly what I did.

The dress has SEVEN buttons.  Three functional buttons on the placket, plus one on each sleeve tab and one on each pocket.  My niece was thrilled.  She immediately asked me to help her put it on (thank goodness it fit, and has some length for her to grow into) and mentioned several times later in the day that her dress has giraffes on it.

I've never sewn a placket before, but it wasn't too bad!  I used the Sew Mama Sew sew-along and it was very helpful.  I also asked for help estimating fabric requirements in the Oliver+S forums, and Nicole and the other ladies there were very helpful!

All in all, I am thrilled with how this little dress turned out and I had a lot of fun sewing it!

Me-Made-May

I decided to participate in Me-Made May this year.  Here's my pledge:

I, Katherine of willknitformath.blogspot.com, sign up as a participant of Me-Made-May '16. I endeavour to wear at least one me-made or refashioned item each day for the duration of May 2016. Underwear will count!

I think this will be a very doable challenge - especially since I have two pairs of me-made underwear and am in the middle of sewing six more.  The underwear will be key later in the month when I'm backpacking for a few days (I plan on wearing my standard RTW backpacking clothing, but I will wear my me-made underwear).  I have several skirts that I've sewn, including one that I refashioned from a pair of jeans.  I also have a few dresses, including one that I plan to wear for my Ph.D. hooding in two weeks.  And of course I have several handknitted sweaters and shawls.  And I  use cloth menstrual pads that I sewed myself, so those will also get worn at some point.

My last CMS knitting

Every Thursday of the academic year for the last six years, I've gone to two seminars: CMS, the graduate student seminar in my department, then tea and cookies followed by Colloquium, our department-wide seminar (which is almost always a guest from outside our university).

I've brought my knitting to almost all of these talks (with the exception of several weeks last Fall when I brought my job applications because I needed more time to work on them).  Last Thursday was my last CMS.  It turned out that the week before was my last colloquium, since the speaker scheduled for last week fell ill and was unable to come.  I'm graduating!  I might have to come up with a new excuse for some kind of weekly update post.

My knitting last week wasn't particularly interesting.  I knitted most of the gusset on the first sock in the pair I'm knitting for my husband's birthday next month.  The black/navy yarn is pretty hard to see.  Knitting men's socks is much more time consuming than women's socks - I'm really noticing that this sock is going much more slowly than the purple knot theory socks I'm knitting for my advisor!

Knot theory socks!

I'm a knot theorist.  (I've posted about this before.)  I defended my Ph.D. thesis last week, my semester ends next week (with me grading lots of finals ... ), and my graduation will be in mid-May.  I can barely believe I'm actually done, and I'm really excited to start my new job in August!  These knot theory socks are a present for my advisor, to thank her for all of the many, many things she has done for me.  I feel so lucky to have such a great advisor.

So, about the socks: purple is the unofficial team color of our research group, so choosing purple yarn was obvious.  I wanted a design that was knot-theory related, so this sock has a braid on the outside of the leg.

A bit about the math:

A knot is an embedding of a circle into 3-dimensional space.  Intuitively, we can think of a length of string that has been tied up in a knot and then had its ends glued together.  It is in some essential sense still a circle - if you were a tiny ant walking along the string, you would eventually get back to where you started, so all you would be able to tell would be that it is a circle (you wouldn't be able to gather any information about how it was knotted up).  In simplest terms, the basic question of knot theory is how to tell different knots apart.  More generally, knots and links (with more than one circle, but still knotted up somehow) are really important to how mathematicians understand 3- and 4-dimensional spaces.

Every knot and link can be represented as the closure of a braid.  A mathematical braid is a set of strands, all oriented in one direction, that can cross over each other but not loop back on themselves.  To take the braid closure, we glue the top and bottom ends together, with the rightmost top end glued to the rightmost bottom end, and so forth.  If we take the braid closure of the braid on this sock, we get the figure eight knot, which is a really cool knot!

The figure eight knot is the second-simplest non-trivial knot (the simplest is the trefoil), and it has the property of being amphicheiral, which means that it can be stretched and rearranged into its mirror image.  This is a very cool property!

The second sock (which I've already started) will have a braid whose closure is the Borromean Rings.  I'll explain why they're so cool once I've finished knitting the braid.

CMS/Colloquium knitting

I finished the leg and knitted the heel flap on the first of Robert's birthday socks.  I ended up just sitting with nothing to do with my hands for the last 20 minutes of Colloquium on Thursday, because I didn't bring the More Sensational Socks book with me, and I needed it to tell me how to start the heel turn.

I also brought this with me to church this morning and knitted in between the services.  I finished the heel turn and started the gusset.  It's zipping along!