Category Archives: Science

It Is Not Worth It To Pre-shrink Size 4, 85% Cotton Yarn

Crochet, Science, , , , , ,

DSC07404 The yarn on left  is an entire skein of the same Premier Home 85% cotton, 15% polyester, size 4 yarn, except, I boiled it, and dried it in the clothes dryer on hot, in order to preshrink it.  The entire skein on the right is in its original, unshrunk condition.

DSC07402 I boiled this yarn in the pot for 15 minutes, and let it sit in the hot water for another 30 minutes, after which I squeezed it out, and placed it in the clothes dryer on a hot setting.  (Its confining thread came off, resulting in the jumbled yarn that you can see above.  I dried it about three more times on hot confining the yarn in a sock, and after this placed it in the sun for two more hours.

It took me an hour in front of the TV to untangle it, and make it into a ball of yarn.  I wondered if rolling it into a ball would undo any shrinkage, because of a very slight residual dampness in the yarn.

I wanted to test at least two things:

  1. Did boiling the  yarn make any difference in the crocheted outcome as seen in these coasters?
  2. How much difference did the crochet hook size have on the coaster size?

To test the shrunk yarn against the pre-shrunk yarn, I made six simple double crochet coasters, three with the preshrunk yarn, and three with the pre-shrunk yarn.  For each treatment of yarn I crocheted one coaster, in order of increasing hook size, a G hook, an H hook, and an I hook.  Two yarns times three hooks, gives the six coasters.

I measured and weighed the coasters, after which I washed them in hot water, and dried them several times on hot, until they were dry.  The coasters ended up looking like this.

DSC07418 The top row of coasters is made with the pre-shrunk yarn, and the bottom row is made with the unshrunk yarn. The first column is made with the G (red) hook, the second column is made with the H (orange) hook, and the third column is made with the I (yellow) hook.  It is clear that the hook size made more of a difference in diameter than did preshrinking.  (Other observations and figures bore this out.)

 

 

 

 

 

A Special Grandmother

Art, Relatives, Science

Just as people say that the most beautiful baby in the world is their grandchild, I say that one of the most beautiful older women to have graced this planet was my grandmother.

DSC03832 Meet Melusina Bernhardina(sp?) Dorothea(sp) Nordmeyer Seehausen, seen here when she may have been about sixty.   The youngest of thirteen children, people said to her father, Henry Nordmeyer, “She is lovely.  You’ll have to keep her at home with you”, as he was heading into his older years.   He said, “No, she is going to have a life.”  After some training in singing, it is said that her voice teacher cried when she left her training to marry.  This was her choice.

DSC03829 Always involved, she originated an art program in the  public high school, wherein reproductions of pictures by famous artists were placed along the hallways.  The funding that she found for this came from recycling newspapers.  Earlier, she painted this self-portrait of herself as a young woman.

When I was a rather arrogant, fresh-water biology graduate student, and I noticed how observant she was, I said to her, “You could have been a scientist.”  She just chuckled.  Now I know how hard-working her family had always been.  Of course, she had the capacity to have become a scientist, had she wanted to, and had she had the opportunity.

Science And the Public

Climate, Infection, Science, ,

DSC03838 Hilarious! But deeper down, there are a couple of reasons behind this.

  1. Ebola, if you catch it, is much more immediate than climate change, although the latter is already detectably going on.
  2. Ebola sounds so individually horrible,  whereas climate change is out there, and does not seem to personally hurt us.

Of course, altogether, climate change is affecting everybody on earth right now, and could even conceivably be aggravating the ebola, by way of increasing stress of change on plant, animal, and human immune systems.

Climate change is already affecting us because we see a lot of drought, more fires, bigger storms, even earthquakes caused by fracking to access the natural gas, which we need to supplement the energy provided by oil and coal burning.