A school in Bracknell U.K. has been working on a project to bring mathematics to life: a blanket with 100 squares, one square for each number between 1 and 100, each square showing how many factors the number has. A prime number (that is, a number that cannot be divided up evenly, e.g. 17) has a two-colored square, representing that it can be divided only by one and itself; a number that can be divided up more (e.g. 18, which can by divided by 1, 2, 3, 6, 9, and 18) has a square with 6 colors.
B.C. Children’s Hospital in Vancouver, Canada, hosted an knit-in event this week aiming to help calm stressed parents and reduce the instances of shaken-baby syndrome.
The hats are purple, capturing the color of a crying infant’s face, and also highlighting the key facets of the “purple” message. “The Period of PURPLE Crying” provides educational information about the properties of normal infant crying that are uniformly frustrating to caregivers, and appropriate action steps that caregivers need to know. Inconsolable infant crying is the number one trigger that precedes a shaking event.
Knitters of all ages – including many children from local schools – worked on hats for babies to be donated to new parents.
Classic Elite Yarns is running a promotion (sadly, in the Continental US only) to encourage knitters to support their local indie yarn shops….
Between now and December 15th, spend $40 or more on yarn or books at any Classic Elite retailer in and send them your receipts. Classic Elite will send you a free recent pattern book and three mini-skeins of their yarn.
More details here.
A lovely little video talking about the 1860 painting “The Knitting Lesson”, by Jean-François Millet.
The Hobbiton village set constructed in Matamata, New Zealand for the Lord of the Rings movie productions has been taken over by sheep. The land is being used by a nearby farm for grazing their sheep.
Indeed, a company offering tours of the village includes “an authentic sheep farm experience” as part of the tour.
Speaking of knitting-friendly holidays, consider perhaps a trip to Iceland. The Icelandic Knitter website has information about tours, sells some gorgeous patterns and hosts some great articles including a history of the Icelandic Knitting tradition. It’s worth visiting the site for the photography alone.
I do enough yarn shopping that I really should try and capitalize on the Classic Elite offering. Payday is right around the corner!
oh wow – thanks for the intro to the Icelandic knitter!