A knitter explains Opportunity Costs

Posted on May 29, 2014 by knitigatingcircumstances

I am busy studying for exams at business school. Today, I was reading about opportunity costs. The basic idea is that resources (including time) are scarce, and that whenever you make a decision to pursue one option, you are incurring a cost. Essentially, the opportunity cost of an activity is what we give up when we make a choice. Let’s say that you own a manufacturing plant which can produce both personal computers and printers. The plant has a relatively fixed capacity, so if you make more computers, you will make less printers.

Another fairly standard example has to do with the costs of a university education. Here is the description from Investopedia.com: “The opportunity cost of going to college is the money you would have earned if you worked instead. On the one hand, you lose four years of salary while getting your degree; on the other hand, you hope to earn more during your career, thanks to your education, to offset the lost wages.”

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So far, so good. Of course, you can take the knitter and put her in business school, but you can’t stop her thinking about knitting. What is this knitter thinking when she reads about opportunity costs? Let’s say that I can knit 10 sweaters a year. The opportunity cost of each sweater that I knit for Emma, Leah or Doug will be one less sweater that I can knit for myself:

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Perhaps this is not a coherent enough example of opportunity costs for the ardent knitter. After all, whether one is knitting for oneself or for others, one is still engaged in knitting.

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Let us take a more cogent example. Let us say that after accounting for necessities (like sleeping, working, eating, cleaning, cooking, showering, commuting, etc) you have 40 hours a week to devote to other activities. Note that I am being very generous with this number because (1) my children are grown up and have flown the coop, and (2) I devote as little time as possible to housework. Now, let us suppose that someone (who shall remain nameless) who finds herself in this new empty-nester position foolishly elects to go to business school and must now fill her free time with studying. Well, then, the opportunity cost of business school is less time to knit.

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Isn’t it obvious? Lesson over, back to work. Alas!

Not blogging in Sicily

Posted on May 23, 2014 by knitigatingcircumstances

I have not done much blogging lately. Is it because I am busy studying for my exams? No. I am in Sicily.

I am staying in a completely gorgeous villa.

The grounds are extensive and beautifully landscaped.

Flowers are blooming everywhere.

The weather is lovely.

It is peaceful.

Some knitting might have taken place.

Though we have been out and about, all of these photos are of the villa where we are staying. Tell me, truthfully, if you were here would you be blogging?

Mathematics, Science and Craft

Posted on May 14, 2014 by knitigatingcircumstances

Today’s episode of Surfing the Knit brings you two knitting-related posts from the fields of mathematics and science!

1. The Guardian hosts a blog by Alex Bello, Alex’s Adventures in Numberland. In today’s post, he showcases some of his favorite images from a new book. Alex writes:

The book 50 Visions of Mathematics is a collection of 50 short essays by 50 maths writers and a foreword by Dara O Briain. Launched on Wednesday to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications, it also contains 50 images supplied in response to an open call from the worldwide maths community.

He then shows us 16 beautiful images from the book. One of the images he shows involves crochet, which is enough of a connection for me to post it here. This is a crocheted model of a hyperbolic plane.

Photo: Daina Taimina

The artist, Daina Taimina, is a Professor of Mathematics at Cornell, who experiments with crocheting mathematical objects. She has published a book on the subject called Crocheting Adventures with Hyperbolic Planes.

Here is a gorgeous image which bears the tag: “A much-magnified detail of the Mandelbrot set, revealing what appears to be a procession of elephants. Image by Philip Dawd, using the program winCIG Chaos Image Generator developed by Thomas Hvel.”

I love this! Astonishing, isn’t it? (I can’t help thinking of the Pink Elephants on Parade sequence from Dumbo; these fractal elephants are considerably more cool and mesmerizing.)

I will tease you with one more image, but then you should really click on the link and see the others. Or maybe even buy the book. At first glance, I thought this was a photo of ripples in sand caused by the wind:

The caption states: “The complex folding patterns that arise when a layered material (paper) is put into a test machine and squashed. Created by Timothy Dodwell and Andrew Rhead, University of Bath.”

I love mathematics and love the art of visualizing mathematics. I think this is part of what draws me to knitting; certainly my conceptualizations of knitting and knitting design are very mathematical.

2. If you are interested in both knitting and science, you should have a look at this post on Dayana Crawchuk’s blog. Dayana writes a beautiful knitting blog; you can tell that an enormous amount of effort goes into each post. Dayana is a scientist in her day job. Her husband, also a scientist, specializes in hearing and deafness and studies hair cells, a type of cell found in the inner ear which is central to the hearing process. I have long been a fan of the Hearing Cell Sweater which Dayana knit for her husband some time ago which incorporates stylized images of the hair cells (follow the link to find photos). She recently knit him a model of the hair cell as a good luck charm (thus the post title, Amigurumi for Nerds). To make a cool story even cooler, Science magazine featured it on their webpages! Even if you are not into hair cell science (and how could you not be!), check out Dayana’s blog – you won’t be sorry.

How to become shapely in 23 days

Posted on May 7, 2014 by knitigatingcircumstances

How to become shapely in 23 days? First, you pick up some knitting neeedles. Then you add an amazing optical illusion of a knitting pattern, designed to showcase curves; a pattern so ingenious it does for the waistline what hours of crunches cannot acheive.

I have had less time to devote to blogging lately, but that doesn’t mean my hands have been idle. In fact, I have just finished knitting a sweater that took only 23 days from start to finish. (And this includes at least a week of no knitting at all while I prepared for a B-school presentation.) This is the fastest I have been able to turn out a project in some time. The pattern is the #11 Hourglass Top designed by Theresa Schabes for Noro Knitting Magazine, Spring 2013. It has a very interesting construction, which accentuates the waist, resulting in an hourglass silhouette.

The sweater is knit in two quick pieces and then seamed together. It is an especially effective construction technique for Noro yarn, which is known for its long colour sequences. At the waist, the stitch count for the back (which wraps around the front of the sweater) is three times that of the front (approximately 150 stitches for the back and 50 stitches for the front). This means that the stripes of any one colour will be deeper on the narrower knitted parts, and shallower on the wider knitted parts, which results in the mis-match of colour sequences along the seams. I don’t think a monotoned yarn, or a yarn with shorter colour changes, would be as affective as the Noro in this design.

This is not only an extremely quick and easy knit, but is also a very cheap one. I used 3 skeins of Noro Silk Garden Sock yarn for this sweater. This makes it about the equivalent cost of two cinema tickets. This is definitely a win-win project.

I do think the pattern runs a bit big. I intended to add a lot of negative ease into the pattern, as I wanted to accentuate the waist. To do this, I tailored a size between the small and medium, casting on 112 stitches and then for the most part following the directions for the second size with respect to increases and decreases. The finished product actually has about zero ease. In fact, when it’s not on the body it appears to have very little waist shaping at all.

Here lies the genious of the pattern. It creates a very effective optical illusion: it looks extremely shapely without being the least bit snug or binding. Notice the rolling at the bottom of the sweater; this was even more problematic with the purled edging called for in the pattern. I ripped out the waist and armhole edgings and redid them in ribbing. This mostly solved the rolling problem, particularly on the armholes. The bottom still rolls up when the sweater is off, but behaves itself when its being worn.