As promised, and thanks to the Tofutsies sock recipient, here are pix of that pair. She's a far better photographer than I'll ever be, so for once shots on String have an element of clarity:

Thanks, Merlyn! You can actually make out the diamonds of eyelets. And thanks again to Kathryn for the Tofutsies yarn. (I feel especially enabled today.)

To make life easier for future reference, here's the chart for the ankle pattern. It's repeated four times around the sock, a convenient one panel per needle if you're knitting with four needles holding 18 stitches each, or two circs with 36 each (a sock circumference of 72 stitches, the count for the largest gauge I knit for myself). This can also be worked as side by side panels of 16 stitches by eliminating columns 1 and 18 (a sock circumference of a more usual 64 stitches). The astute will be able to pick out from the excellent photo that I followed the pattern as presented in Duchrow, but my chart below offers up several modifications to the original:

Or if you're adventurous, here's my own riff on the same idea to make an argyle-like diamond studded all-over repeat - this time requiring a fixed multiple of 18 stitches (It can also be worked as a single panel of 18):

This adaptation is so blindingly obvious that it must be presented in other stitch sources. For example, without running to my library I am pretty sure that Walker presents a diamond of double YO eyelets in her second Treasury. Which is another way of saying that there's little new in knitting, and most invention is more of a process of rediscovery than virgin creation.

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Here I am. Remember me?

As occasional readers here have noted before, extended periods between posts usually mean that my professional life has up and swallowed my personal life, and that I'm hard pressed by work-related deadlines. The past couple of months has been no exception. I will say that even though I get swamped, I do try to grab a little relaxation time, but when I do I usually stick to autopilot rather than challenging knitting.

Which is all a round about excuse for why nothing has been done on my Sempre pullover of late. I haven't had time to sit down and draft out the fulll size mockup. I'll get around to it, but not until after I decompress. In the mean time I've been sticking to nice, boring sock knitting.

Long Time Needlework Pal Kathryn surprised me with a nifty gift - two skeins of lively, variegated pink SWTC Tofutsies, a wool/cottom/soy silk/crab shell chitin fingering weight yarn. I was pleasantly surprised by the Tofutsies. I'm not a fan of cotton sock yarns, and usually stick to all wool or wool/nylon. To me cotton is unstretchy to knit, and both clammy and pebbly underfoot. Not so the Tofutsies. It knits up nice and soft, not pebbly at all. It is however not as stretchy as wool - sort of somewhere in between wool and cotton in total stretch. Because I favor toe-ups with short row heels which rely heavily on total stretch for their ankle to instep fit, I was hesitant to use the Tofutsies for my standard issue sock. Instead I adapted Wendy's toe up gusset heel for my stitch count. It worked perfectly, making a sock with more than enough depth and with for comfortable fit, even with the un-stretchy yarn. For the decorative ankle part, I adapted yet another one of the simplest double yarn over eyelet insertion strips from Duchrow, Vol. 1. This one featured diamonds of eyelets, embedded in an 18 stitch repeat. I wish I had pix, but I gave the pair to a pal who was thirsty for warm socks in a sprightly, spring pink. She has promised to take some snaps though which I will eventually post.

And for those who are dying to ask, no. This yarn does not smell like crab shells. If anything, it smells like cotton yarn, not wool yarn, even though it has twice as much wool in it as it does cotton.

My Tofutsies pair was a super-quick knit, so I started a second pair of socks out of another sock yarn new to my stash. This time it was Berroco Sox, in color #1425 (called John Moores on the B. website, and from the grouping named after the UK entrepreneur or Liverpool-based university, not the US baseball team owner), working my standard toe-up with short-rowed heel. I like this yarn. Although I did find one knot in the skein, the rest of the thing was comparable in feel and gauge to Regia or Fortissima. Very nice, indeed. Especially considering that it was slightly less expensive than those Euro-labels. (The yarn itself is imported.)

The color run repeated roughly twice between toe and heel for me, and with each stripe being very shallow and the color patterning being hard to discern in skein, was fun to watch build. You can't really see it in the standard issue lousy String pix below, but I knit the feet smooth and introduced an ultra simple diagonal lacy detail on the ankle:

It's a simple double yarn over diagonal, done on an 8 stitch repeat (my socks are usually 72 or 80 stitches around). The idea was to leave enough solid to let the color repeat play, but keep me from dying of boredom knitting miles of plain stockinette. Here's left and right hand varinants of the thing, just in case you want to make a pair of complementary socks, too:

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O.k., so it's not knitting. But String today celebrates Ada Lovelace Day, and takes part in a meta-project to honor women in technology, science and engineering worldwide on Tuesday 24 March. Although I'm non-of-the-above myself, I supposed if I had more support in advanced math, I'd have made it. But I didn't and ended up a proposal writer - interpreting between the worlds of the engineer and the decision maker. So it goes.

It happens that the very first proposal I worked on was a series of grants for New York Institute of Technology to establish a pipeline program, providing tutors and other assistance to girls and minority students starting in fifth grade, with the goal of piquing then maintaining their interest and abiltiy in math and science. After completion of the program those students were pre-admitted to NYIT. I have no idea how many kids that program helped, but by my estimate the first group of them should be ten or so years out of college by now (fewer if they went on to grad school). Perhaps they're fueling a quiet revolution in biotechnology or advanced computing somewhere.

In any case, on to the point.

A good place to start is the Smithsonian's Women in Science gallery. Sure, it's got pix of Marie Curie, of whom everyone has heard. But it also has pix of many women engineers, scientists, and science educators who are not as well known, but who should be.

I choose to honor Annie Jump Canon (1863-1941), luminary in astronomical research and stellar classification. Although living in a time deeply ambivalent (if not hostile) to advanced education for women, and suffering from profound hearing impairment after a teenage bout with scarlet fever Annie graduated from Wellsely College in 1884 with a degree in physics. She returned there for graduate studies in physics and astronomy, eventually gaining an MA in 1907. During her time at Wellsley she was hired by the Harvard College Observatory, and along with several other women, paid a pittance (less than a Harvard secretary) to assist Edward Pickering to compile the Draper Catalog, a massive, annotated atlas of all the stars in the sky.

While she was part of this project (itsef funded by Anna Draper, a wealthy widow of an amateur astronomer), Annie was instrumental in defining the spectral classification system, which defines the star classes O, B, F, G, K, and M - a system based on stellar temperature that along with later enhancements is still used today. Annie's personal work included extensive cataloging of variable stars, including 300 for which she is credited as discoverer, and classifying over 230,000 stellar bodies, the most anyone has defined to this day.

You can read more about Annie and her work at a dedicated memorial at Wellesley's website. There are other pages about her here, and on Wikipedia.

I close with a quotation from her:

"In our troubled days it is good to have something outside our planet, something fine and distant for comfort."

Annie, shine on!

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