Recovering the Doves Type

If you're a bibliophile like I am, you might have noticed that the endpapers of hardcover editions usually include a note about the typefaces used in the book. (For a more general layman's overview of the history of typography, I recommend the book Just My Type by Simon Garfield.) While the origin stories of typefaces might seem a relatively dry topic, they sometimes make for fascinating tales of adventure and intrigue. To wit, that of the Doves Type, one of the most influential typefaces of the past couple of centuries:

http://creativereview.co.uk/cr-blog/2015/february/recovering-the-doves-type

The improbable saga of their recovery seems like something straight out of a Sherlock Holmes novel! (If compelled to choose one, I'd compare it to The Sign of the Four.)  But it's the ending that strikes me; after such a journey, the "treasure hunter" and type designer Robert Green notes that he'll never sell the portion of the typeface that he kept for himself, saying, "It’s too precious. I feel very attached to it now I’ve retraced Cobden-Sanderson’s steps and stood on that very same spot of the bridge." I can sympathize with a sentimental attachment to a piece of history that becomes an obsession! It's fundamentally human to assign value to artifacts of culture, even those that seem a small and incidental portion of a more significant work.

'Tis the Season... for Jack-o-Lanterns!

Earlier this month, a couple of my childhood friends and I made jack-o-lanterns! I hadn't carved a pumpkin in years and years, so I was a bit out of practice. Here are the finished products:

The first and second ones on the left are mine. I'm especially pleased with this one:

If you can't tell, it's a mini-Totoro! He's starting to wilt by now, but as you can see, he was cute when I first made him. :-)

Any Hallowe'en crafts in your homes?

Today

I performed at an open mic for the first time in a while. I went to the one at Pete's in Brooklyn, a cozy, non-judgmental venue I've played on occasion in the past. I had a new song to try out in front of an audience, and I don't think I have been this nervous about performing in quite a long time.

Art -- true art -- is terrifyingly honest, terrifyingly intimate. I would liken it to a flaying of the soul, so that complete strangers can see my bones and sinews, the colour of my blood and the ticking of my heart. It's the baring of the darkest and most vulnerable parts of oneself, the parts that make us most human. The fact that we can write about such things, can continue to sing about them and use them to fuel our greatest creative works, means that we are every day surviving them and weaving them into the fabric of our existence.

Part of what moves us to create, what drives us (or at least me) to write, is that it's an extension -- even a distillation -- of self. I've often heard writers say that there's a piece of themselves in every work of literature they produce. One's creation never quite lives up to the vision in one's mind, no matter how we strive for perfection, but seeing it actualized on the page fulfills in us a primal need to see ourselves (our thoughts, our dreams, our nightmares) reflected in the world around us -- the wonderful, frightening, and utterly strange place that it is.

So I sat on a barstool, under a spotlight in a dark room where I didn't know anybody, looking out into that small sea of upturned faces. I was there to play a song that I was in serious danger of not being able to finish -- I am still too close to the material. I had other pieces I could have performed instead and no one would have been the wiser -- and for a few heart-stopping moments I considered switching songs -- but I felt that I owed it to myself to bite down and see it through. The very nature of art, it occurred to me then, meant that -- if I was doing it right -- I would always be, in some capacity, too close to the material. It's not supposed to be safe or comfortable or without risk. It's meant to be honest, a reckoning you're never quite ready for.

On that stage, fingering the first few notes on my ukulele, I realized that I couldn't make out a single face in the crowd -- that I wasn't playing for them at all. I wasn't thinking about whether they would enjoy it or what they would think of me. All I knew was that, in those five minutes, for all that it would leave me gutted and flayed, I had to get through the song for me. It was the most perfectly selfish thing -- and it was exactly what I needed.

I sang it with my eyes squeezed shut. I left out one or two chords in the middle of the piece. My voice cracked once -- I may have choked up at some point. But I remembered all of the words, and in the right order. It was not my best performance, but by god, it was art. 

And the moment of silence before the applause, when all I could hear was the buzz of the stage lights and the thundering of my own heartbeat in my ears -- that was a small victory in itself.

Baby Blanket (Knitting Project)

I should have posted this several months ago (when it occurred)...

My god-sister recently had a baby (as I mentioned in this video), and in anticipation, I knitted her a blanket:

Before:

After:

It was originally going to be 8x8 (the father is a chess player) but the squares ended up too rectangular, so I nixed the last row.

Also, the baby is a girl, but these were the nicest colors at the store. Pink is too hetero-normative!

Cover-a-Week #10: "Finite Simple Group (of Order Two)" by Klein Four

For Pi Day (slightly belated), I decided to cover a math-themed song, by the extremely nerdy a cappella group Klein Four...


http://youtu.be/d1TzNJhrM98

The shirt was one of the more useful nerdy gifts I've received. The armwarmers are my own handiwork; they have separate little sleeve-like protrusions for the thumbs. One trick for knitting armwarmers: if you don't want to decrease and increase the circumference (as the wrist is thinner than the elbow and the hand), knit vertical ribs, which naturally scrunch up.

Candy Heart

This is wonderful:

http://scienceroll.com/2007/11/26/anatomical-heart-made-from-candy-hearts/

It's a model heart made from (if you can't tell from the picture) those candy hearts with the pink messages on them.

Is it just me, or does anyone else think that this would make a really cute St. Valentine's Day present (especially in the case of broke college students)? (Of course, there's the question of what to do with such an object. If it were made of entirely edible materials, I suppose one could eat it.)

Edit: And here's how to actually make something along these lines (especially with regard to preservation of the specimen) -- http://makeprojects.com/Project/How-to-Preserve-a-Candy-Portrait/395/1#.T9cQ6uLMAys

Toothpick Miniature of the San Francisco Bay

I found this, and it's breathtaking. I'm not sure I'd have the patience to build something like this, honestly, but I can certainly gawk at someone else's creation:


Scott Weaver's Rolling through the Bay from Learning Studio on Vimeo.

Knitting a Poem

This is perhaps the coolest knitting project I've ever seen:
http://www.poetrysociety.org.uk/content/knit/

They're knitting a poem. (And not just any poem -- a Dylan Thomas poem.) My mind is blown.

I'm sorely tempted to try my hand at one of these quilts. New summer project? It would be a tremendously meaningful gift for a loved one, I think, given a particularly fitting poem (one that is, hopefully, not too long!).

Edit: Perhaps this poem? There isn't anyone for whom it would be appropriate, at this time.

Edit II: Alphabet knitting diagram: 
http://littlecottonrabbits.typepad.co.uk/photos/alphabet/

Edit III: possibly the ultimate collection of alphabet patterns:
http://www.chemknits.com/2009/08/assembly-of-alphabet-charts.html

NYTimes: Food Art

It's a bit like the heart-shaped pancakes or creatively-cut sandwiches I used to try to make as a kid, but about a hundred times more awesome:

http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/05/how-do-you-want-your-eggs-scrambled-or-smiling/?hp

One of the things I've always wanted to get better at is cooking. I figure it's about time, since I'm a year or so away from graduating, and I'd like to have more than just basic competency on that score when I hit the Real World. Chances are, I'll end up living at home for some time (until I'm in a position to live on my own, in New York City, no less), but building a repertoire in cooking takes time.

And of course, artistic sandwiches are always a plus. :)

NYTimes: Crafting the Perfect Crossword

I have a certain fondness for crosswords; I enjoy doing them, and I wrote a few (by hand, yes) for my high school paper (they were quite amateur, and I'm sure I would be embarrassed to see them again). A friend (John) and I would sometimes do New York Times crosswords together between classes; we wouldn't often finish, but it was fun nonetheless. And I've encountered crosswords in events like College Puzzle Challenge and Google Games; being the only fuzzy in a passel of techies does occasionally have its rewards.

Anyhow, a piece on crossword construction as a hobby and an art:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/07/science/07construct.html?hpw

Knitting over Winter Break

The last batch of yarn, barring any major catastrophes:

I bought the four skeins directly above the half-finished scarf two days ago; the others are from a while back. I plan to finish seven scarves over break, which will cover the rest of the friends I plan to give them to when we get back to school. I have about eighteen days. I don't think it's unreasonable, given the (admittedly short) plane rides and (longer) car rides ahead.

I'm also, if there's some yarn left over (and there should be!), thinking of knitting something small and eminently practical for my father.

I won National Novel Writing Month!

30 days, 50071 words written, 6 scarves knitted. It's been quite the adventure.

(There are more than six scarves here, but two of them are unfinished, and three of them are from October, if you remember the last picture.)

It was awesome. It was absolutely worth all the sleep deprivation, all the stress, all the time spent holed up in my room pounding away at the keyboard at ungodly hours. The community was amazing, both my class here at Stanford and the online community that sprang up around the forums and chatrooms as everyone raced towards 50K.

And I actually rather like my novel this year! I haven't really gone back to the other two 50K+ NaNo novels I've written, simply because I didn't think they were really worth editing. (Well, that's not strictly true; I did edit one of them extensively, or tried to, but hit a wall about halfway through -- I think I got through seven or so chapters -- and decided that it just wasn't good enough.) This year's... we'll see. I like it, still, after spending a month wrangling with it, so I think it has some small glimmer of promise.

Anyhow, for those interested, my stats page and user info are here: http://www.nanowrimo.org/user/127574. You'll notice the few days towards the end when I pulled all-nighters and pounded out about 6000 words a day. Worth it, all of it, even so. Don't ask about the plateaus in weeks two and three.

Time to catch up on everything -- work, reading, friends, sleep, life. Same time next year, folks!

If I Used Twitter

last night's status would have been:

re-upholstering a couch, knitting like a fiend, and blasting Bach's St. Matthew Passion.

That is all.

NaNoWriMo

starts now. My posting will probably be much less frequent this coming month, since I'll be spending most of my "free" time typing like a madwoman. And knitting scarves.

That is all -- I have a novel to write. Happy All Hallow's!

Edit: I've added a widget to the sidebar so that interested parties can track my wordcount in realtime. ("Aethyr" is my username on the NaNoWriMo website.)

Christmas Knitting

So I've decided to knit a bunch of my Stanford friends scarves for the holidays -- enough of them that I started in October. I went to buy more yarn with Julie yesterday, and I think I'll need to make another yarn run in a few weeks. Here's (me with) eleven skeins of yarn and three finished scarves:

I've been getting some of my patterns off of this website; it's particularly useful because each entry provides both the full stitch notation and pictures. If you knit, it's a wonderful resource.

I can't wait until I get to give these to people in two months or so!

NYTimes: Designing Your Own Wallpaper

I really want to do something like this when I get my own place someday:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/15/technology/personaltech/15basics.html?src=me&ref=technology

I think it would be fun to essentially design my own wallpaper.  I've been thinking of some things that might be awesome:

• A map of the world. I'd put little stickers, or pushpins, or something, on all the places I've visited. I love traveling -- I love exploring all the history and art and architecture, the cultural relics of centuries past (You can probably tell from the Italy posts.).
• An underwater scene. It would be like having an enormous aquarium, only lower-maintenance and more practical (especially since certain beautiful species of fish are rather difficult to keep alive at home, not to mention that certain species don't get along with other species, or members of the same sex of the same species, &c.).  I am a huge fan of anything colorful or shiny that swims around (if I had one of those aquarium screensavers, I'm sure my productivity would plummet).
• A lakeside scene. Something along the lines of a 山水画, which is a specifically Chinese kind of painting (well, the Japanese have something like it too, but it was mostly borrowed from the Chinese). There's no good translation for it that quite captures the complete meaning of the phrase; the literal meaning is "mountain water picture". It's a particularly peaceful sort of landscape painting that I rather like. 
• The sky. I would love to wallpaper a ceiling with a picture of the sky -- perhaps a sunny blue sky with clouds and kites, or a rich sunset, or (if it wouldn't darken the room too much) a night sky with glow-in-the-dark stars -- not the plastic, five-pointed stick-on kind, but stars as seen by the human eye. I know it's not really the done thing to have ceilings of any color but white, but it would be awesome. (Unlike the other ideas, stars could be painted onto a monochromatic black or blue ceiling, but not with the same accuracy. And I'd have to stick the moon up there anyhow.)

Note to self: reread this blog entry in a few years.

Phiala's String Page

For all the computer scientists of my acquaintance, this has nothing to do with the sort of strings you guys know. This is a great page on medieval fiber arts:

http://www.stringpage.com

I've done a bit of tablet weaving, and quite a bit of braiding, and have ambitions to try some of the other types of weaving, &c. on the page. I also knit, but that's almost out of period, having originated in its recognizable form around the Renaissance, I believe.

Regency Costuming: The Aftermath

I thought people might be interested in seeing the final product, so here are some pictures of me at the dance, courtesy of Lucas:

Yes, I know it's not accurate in that it's sleeveless. Puffy sleeves of the Regency persuasion are ridiculously annoying to make, not to mention that they're really difficult to render in such a way as to allow free movement of the shoulder. I decided that if some people were allowed to come as zombies, I was certainly allowed a bit of artistic license.

And here's a full body picture, with a shawl. You can see the ruffles along the bottom edge. (I did them by hand, and it took forever!) And the guy whose face you can see on the right is the social dance instructor here, Richard Powers. He's sort of a mini-celebrity on campus.

The Evolution of Women's Fashion through the Regency and Victorian Eras

http://www.pemberley.com/janeinfo/ppbrokil.html#ppoth

More costuming! The above diagram is just great; not only do you get surprisingly good detail at the given scale (click on it), you also get to compare the silhouettes by decade-ish. I'm going for somewhere between the second and third figures, myself. (Thank goodness it's a Regency ball. Some of the Victorian ones are insane; I don't know how I'd walk in one of those gigantic bustle/hobble skirt numbers, let alone dance!)

An Introduction to Regency Dress

http://www.rakehell.com/article.php?id=387&Title=Introduction-To-Regency-Dress

A rather useful website: concise, has most of the relevant information, some background thrown in, and a good number of illustrations. All it really needs is a schematic -- but then again it's an introduction, not a how-to. There are enough pictures at different angles that I can reconstruct the average gown.