Chainmail Sweatshirt

A sewing and knitting blog should include some content about sewing and knitting, right?

I woke up one morning in January and thought, I want a sweatshirt resembling chainmail. I know; it must be a common dream based on the number of metallic sweatshirts in the stores this season.  I might have dreamt about it because I came across this scrap when going through my fabric collection recently.

I had purchased it ~5 years ago for a costume for Iris.  Because she played one of two guards,  this scrap wasn't large enough for both of them.  I found another piece (also from SAS) that could pass for chainmail at a distance and sufficiently large to make two costumes.

With some creative layout (I hope this fabric is without nap!), I managed to squeeze the front and body pieces out of the scrap.  I backed them with lightweight gray rayon/cotton jersey for opacity and contrast.

I purchased some black cotton/lycra jersey on my last trip to Fabrix in San Francisco.  It wasn't beefy enough for the neck and bottom bands so I used some cotton doubleknit found at Trash for Teaching.  Try not to imagine the piles of fabric in my sewing room that can yield exactly the right material for my last few projects without having to go out and purchase anything extra.

Instead, let us coo at the unbearable cuteness and genius of guinea pig armor.

Look at that intimidating warrior face!

I've added the photos to my Flickr Kwik Sew 2874 set. Kwik Sew 2874 is still in print.

The pattern illustration may be dated, but the pattern is timeless and well-engineered. If you look at the Kwik Sew 2874 gallery post, you'll see this pattern has potential.  I've made it 9 times already.  I highly recommend purchasing it while you still can.

In defense of Home Ec 3

I realize that Home Ec has become unfashionable in feminist circles, but it is historically important as a career path into science for so many talented women in prior generations.  Universities were willing to accept women in some departments only because they had viable career paths in industry working in food and textile sciences.

Make no mistake about it.  The nutrition science major at UC Berkeley is among the most challenging ones on campus.  Nutrition students have to learn everything required of biochemistry majors, take all pre-med requirements and then take nutrition classes on top of it.

I read in The Queen of Fats that the reason it took so long for other labs to replicate/confirm UC Berkeley's research in omega-3 fatty acids and cholesterol ratios was because no other food science department had access to the special centrifuges at Lawrence Berkeley Labs.  (They were a holdover from the Manhattan Project.)

Women who were interested in studying chemistry could sneak into their local universities as Home Ec majors and take everything that chemistry majors take.  Then they can apply at more enlightened universities further from home for graduate studies in chemistry.

Topologically-inclined women also studied Home Ec so that they could work as pattern-makers--an engineering discipline that pays much better than fashion design.  I was delighted to read that David Hockney's mother had been a pattern-maker in her youth.  I was less delighted when he wrote about how she was harassed into quitting by a colleague who was jealous/threatened by her superior abilities.  She continued to sew for her family.  When Hockney first sold a painting, he purchased a better sewing machine for his mom (along with more paint for himself) with the proceeds.

I've written about sewing and topology before, and will do so in the future, but let's get back to my intended subject.

I initially applied to graduate school to chemistry departments as a physical chemist.  I was particularly taken with spectroscopy and the study of reaction dynamics.  There is something so intellectually satisfying when you go from the micro world of quantum mechanics, compute the available energy before and after chemical reactions according to quantum rules, and then come out with a pretty accurate prediction for bulk reaction rates.  It's better than magic.

Science departments commonly fly prospective graduate students to visit in person after acceptance.  "Prospectives" receive schedules that provide time to meet with students and professors in their research field of interest.

My undergraduate research advisor, who had guided me through the application process, expressed surprise to see Dick Bernstein on my UCLA visit schedule.  He thought that Bernstein was no longer taking graduate students in preparation for retirement.  Did that mean they had to pad out my schedule because not enough active professors were interested in me?  Was that a bad sign?

No matter.  This gave me 30 minutes alone with the co-author of Molecular Reaction Dynamics and Chemical Reactivity and co-creator of Surprisal Analysis (the degree with which we are thermodynamically surprised by an experimental outcome).  I mean, who wouldn't want to spend time alone with someone with the imagination and humor to get IUPAC to accept Surprisal as an official chemical term?  Calculating surprisal indices is one of the funnest things imaginable.  But, it does take a lot of math and hard work in lab to get to the point where you can calculate one.

At the appointed time, I went to his office.  I asked why he was on my schedule even though he was winding down his research lab.  He said that my personal statement reminded him so much of his childhood, he wanted to meet me.  One of my science heroes wanted to meet me!

My personal statement was personal.  I broke the rules about not bringing any additional attention to my gender.  I wrote about staring out the window as a child and wondering why the sky was blue (common enough for spectroscopists).  But, I also wrote about learning to love chemistry in the kitchen with my first science teacher, my mother.  I learned about oxidation and chelation by squeezing lemon juice on bananas or in tea.  My mom told funny stories about her chemistry lab in nursing school and encouraged me to take science classes whenever possible.

His extended biography showed more parallels.  We both double-majored in math and chemistry.  His mother sewed and ran a dress shop.  And, we both puttered around in the kitchen with our moms, learning chemistry and being surprised.

I highly recommend reading both the extended biography published by the National Academy Press after a conference to celebrate his life and contributions and his NY Times obit.

You never know where Home Ec will lead you.  I'm certainly glad that it led me to meet this extraordinary man.

In defense of Home Ec 2

I attended a parent informational meeting about Common Core implementation in our school district. I saw the district superintendent from In defense of Home Ec. The scene was too, too funny and brought to mind Tom Wolfe's classic piece, Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers.  If you are not familiar with that piece, I recommend reading it here.

Imagine a room with a very tall white male boss sitting silently while putting three women (flak-catchers) up at the front of the room to deliver bad news to a room full of hostile suburban moms.  All three women hold EdDs and went by Dr So-and-So; two of them are women of color.

I sat in the back, as did many of the other moms I know to be skeptical about the latest educational reforms that would solve world hunger, bring about world peace and an expanding economy for all.
He wants to implement an integrated curriculum?  Let's talk again about how Home Ec can be part of the educational renaissance.

It may not surprise readers that I recycle ingredients in my kitchen as well as in my sewing room.  While we don't eat much meat, I save the bones in a freezer bag.  When we receive a CSA box, I wash and trim the produce as I put it away in the refrigerator.  The scraps go into another freezer bag.  When they are full, I throw them in a stock pot along with garlic, a quartered onion, some aromatic vegetables (carrots, celery, parsley family), herbs and half a lemon.

The acidity from the lemon juice helps dissolve the calcium in the bones, making a calcium-fortified broth.  It also helps bring out the nutrients in the bone marrow.  (I am a lapsed Buddhist; I feel strongly that, as long as you are going to eat dead animals, you should use as much of them as possible.)

Your grandmother didn't need to be taught this.  Recall how many chicken soup recipes include lemons.

When I make stock, I use the pasta insert in my 8 quart stock pot.  When everything has cooked down, I just lift up the solids in the pasta insert to drain and throw them into the compost bin.  Then I strain the liquid concentrated stock.  Yum.

A friend brought back a gift of Herbes de Provence after bike touring in Provence, which I used often in lieu of a "bouquet garni".  Rather than buy more when that supply ran out, I snipped rosemary, thyme, garlic chives, and bay and lemon leaves from my backyard.  I call that "Herbes de Redondo Beach" or "Herbes de Felony Flats" depending on the mood.

I don't have a recent picture of stock-making.  But I snapped a picture when making chicken-cilantro soup recently.  Notice I browned the quarter chicken, skin-side down, before adding the onions.  After the onions browned, I added water and the other ingredients.

When I worked in a chemistry lab, we read the experiments and planned our laboratory time so we can multi-task, yet focus on one thing at a time while other things were on a burner, cooling, or drying in an oven or on the roto-vap.  I do the same thing in the kitchen.

I gathered extra ingredients from the garden and washed then at the same time to make salad dressing while the soup simmered.

As Mark Bittman explained in this video, you can make myriad salad dressings with the formula: a fat, an acid, and flavoring.  I use olive oil and juice from a Meyer lemon from our back yard.

The dressing after blending.

Notice the yogurt maker behind the blender?  I heated the milk in the microwave before starting the soup.  After I got the soup going, the milk had been held at a warm temperature long enough for the remaining steps.  If you don't let the milk rest at a high--but below boiling--temperature for a sufficient amount of time, your yogurt won't set.  That's a lesson in polymer chemistry.

My sister knitted the fair-isle hat for Iris before realizing that Kauni is too scratchy for Iris to willingly wear. Fortunately, the hat fits my EasiYo yogurt maker.

Making yogurt is a good biology project to learn about microbes in different environments.  The air is damp by the beach and contains a little bit of mold.  Yogurt can pick up microbes from the air.  If I keep using the old batch for a starter. they develop a yeasty bread smell.  Not unpleasant, but not yogurt-y.

I need to use 1/4 to 1/3 of a packet of yogurt mix to add fresh L.bulgaricus, S.thermophilus, Bifidobacteria, and L.acidophilus to compete against the local micro-fauna.  The yogurt mix also contains milk powder from free-range cows in New Zealand, adding omega-3 fatty acids to our diet.  By using both milk and milk powder, I add calcium and protein, too.

A morning in the kitchen can provide lessons in project management, geography, ecology, chemistry and biology.  A science experiment you can eat!