Needles & Nilbogs

 I’M FREEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!! … sorry. School got out today. Anyways, I’m just going to get that out of my system.  Ahem. Who wants to see crocheted Platonic solids, aka dice? This has been my project since the school carnival, and basically it’s a lot of granny squares/pentagons/triangles that are either crocheted or sewn together and stuffed kind of loosely. I took no notes and wrote no patterns, and I gave the pink/purple cube to my brother (he asked for one, I made it in his favorite color).  Also, if anyone does something like this, I’d suggest sewing it together rather than crocheting it, because whip stitches were easier and prettier than the crochet. These are DMC perle cotton and embroidery floss, in mostly random arrays of color that looked good to me. My standard 1.5mm steel hook continues to be my favorite crochet hook, and I used it here. My suggestions for anyone who wants to try something similar: sew rather than crochet them together, look up nets for polyhedr...

 Believe me, I should have done something fancy this week, but I’m at the stage of the semester where I’m just kind of done and I don’t want to do anything but read my phone and wait to be all the way done. So, instead, I present a thing I started back in October, around Homecoming season, and picked up again last week in time for Prom season. I have a second, related thing, but that again must be pushed to next week while I wait on a friend who promised to playtest it.  If you had a “typical” american high school education, you might remember Prom and Homecoming. Two big dances, one more casual and open to everyone (Homecoming or HoCo), and one very formal, for upper-classpeople only (Prom). For people like me, dances are either really really fun, or horrible agony. Sometimes both. So I present: Ways to Handle School Dances and the Emotional and Physical Stimuli Attached to Them.  Basically, this is my list of things that helped me survive hoco and prom without dying, an...

I had all these ideas, but somehow I just have no motivation to write this week. I have a thing, a gaming thing. It is almost done, but I don’t know how to get to the point where it’s done. I am so close. It just doesn’t want to be finished. So today, I’m going to whine about discuss the DMC numbering system for floss colors, and complain about all the better options explore ways that it could be easier to remember.  First, the DMC numbering system is a means of organizing their vast array of colors. They have at least a thousand color codes, all of which define a very specific color and shade. These codes don’t have any relation to the colors they represent, and there’s no rhyme or reason to the codes. Some related colors are near each other, like 971 Pumpkin and 970 Pumpkin Light, or 796 and 797, both dark blues. But 815 is a dark red and 818 is light pink, and some shades (mostly ecru) don’t have a number even. It’s frustrating, hard to remember, and usually easy to mix up the...

 Too busy to write, studying for APUSH, scribbled this out last week and meant to get this out earlier but forgot.  I wrote myself a calc practice problem or two, all yarn related. How many can you solve? 1. The circumference C (in stitches) of a Pi Shawl is defined as a function of its radius r (in rounds); C = 2r. The area of a circle is pi*r^2. At the point where the circumference is 4, the radius is increasing by 3 rounds/hr. What is the rate of change of the area with respect to time? (Area is measured in rounds^2)  2. The rate at which a knitter adds stitches to a blanket, in stitches per hour, can be modeled in terms of the number of stitches in the blanket (unrealistic, but still): dS/dt = 1/5(500 - S), for 0 ≤ t ≤ 25 . At time t=0, there are 10 stitches in the blanket. a) Find the rate at which the knitter adds stitches when there are 250 stitches in the blanket. b) Find S(t). c) Will the blanket be completely done (S=500) after 25 hours? How many stitches did th...