i will soon abate.

hyperbolics have taken over once again. these teaching stints at the knit cafe have really rekindled my destructive addiction to hyperbolic crochet. i had to cut myself off for a while back in the fall so that i could sober up and focus more attentions on my potentially money-making projects. after the financial battering my play gave me, this was a pretty important move.

it's not like i'm any richer now. but spring is in the air and a young lady's fancy can so easily turn back to the corpulent frills of these wooly figures. needless to say, i'm back to my old tricks - crocheting on the streetcar and rebuffing the advances of chatty strangers. i mean, if they really wanted to know what i was doing, they'd find my blog, right?

to the end of furthering the cause (and as an aid to students of hyperbolic crochet everywhere), i have created a new hyprbolic crochet taxonomic gallery on flickr. there is another hyperbolic crochet group there but the administrator seems to have lost interest and, unhindered, the pool is filling with pictures of hats, amigurumi bunnies and other off topic flotsam. the aim of this new group is to both share pictures of hyperbolic models and to share their increase rates/materials/guages/whathaveyous. hopefully, this will prove helpful to those continuing on in their own arguable useless addictions. we at the sweetie pie press are nothing if not enablers.

this hyperbolic life.

photos by belphoebe

today was spent in the most delightful manners. an early morning trip to st. lawrence market to goof around with the reverend (i bought i really nice dress that was not part of the plan), an afternoon class on hyperbolic crochet at the knit cafe and a nerve-wracking performance of an excerpt from my play at the summerworks festival launch party. the latter activity was only nerve-wracking because i made it that way. i just haven't been in the swing of scripted performance lately. but the crowd was exceptionally warm (read: wine drunk). thank you for that. and thank you, michael, for inviting me out of my rut.

the crochet class, on the other hand, was much less stressful - although i always feel a self-imposed pressure/fear when teaching anything to anyone. regardless of my neuroses, an afternoon spent in simple crochet and complex mathematical thought is always restorative. like a knob, i didn't bring my camera so i've stolen some pictures for this posting. that also means you will get to see a picture of me explaining excesses of surface by flapping my hands about.

the hyperbolic future.

for those who'd like to know, know this:

i will be teaching another workshop in hyperbolic crochet at the knit cafe in april, complete with on-hand resources and mind-bending conversation about advanced geometry.

it will be sunday, april 13, 2008 from noon o'clock until three o'clock in the afternoon. if you'd like to book yourself in, you should do so through the knit cafe. word is, space is filling up.

here's a write-up for the workshop for those fond of "information":

In this one-day class, students will cover basic skills involved with crochet-in-the-round to create a pseudosphere (or the hyperbolic equivalent of a cone). We will cover basic crochet topics such as yarn selection, gauge and hook matching and even stitching techniques as well as delving into the possible variations of hyperbolic models. Mathematical materials, books and articles will also be on hand for reference (although, make no mistake, your instructor is much more knowledgeable in crochet than higher mathematics) and discussion of hyperbolic possibilities is encouraged. From this course, students will leave with the skills to make as many hyperbolic cones as they should ever want with infinite mathematical variations. The course also teaches the basic skills for crochet-in-the-round, which can also be used to make simple hats, potholders, tea cozies, slippers and other round things.

mega crochet.

i visited marnie yesterday after work to distribute some fabric scraps and generally talk about making things and living life. she has a three year old so a) grown-up time is much appreciated and b) we had a very funny visit filled with constant diversions. she's lucky to have a little one so easily distracted by feeding fabric scraps to her pet dragon.

marnie has also recently taken to making this crazy yarn from the seams of the wool sweaters she felts for other craft uses. she was generous enough to send me home with a huge bag of wonky wool and i couldn't resist diving right into it last night. for one thing, it gave me cause to break in the biggest crochet hook i have (if you're looking for such a marvel, i got mine on etsy here, although i am also needling a local woodworker to start making huge hooks for the massive hookers of toronto). secondly, when crocheting in preposterous gauge the work goes preposterously fast and i need quick gratification these days; i'm a busy gal.

at the moment, i am crocheting in the round and it looks like the beginning of a crazy rug, although there is a part of me that thinks i may pull this apart and try something else. i'm having trouble committing at the moment and it's doesn't help that my sweetie looked at me like i was some kind of crazy cat lady when he saw me making this thing. maybe i just need to take my friend hazel's advice; she used to say that if you feel your project is going awry it probably just needs more craziness heaped on top of it. in her case, this usually applied to excessive silkscreening but i might have some dry felting and free form embroidery in my future.

regardless, working on a massive scale is immensely satisfying. and the yarn itself is a lot of fun to work with.

marnie also gave me some bits of fabric. it's amazing, i decided two weeks ago i was going to undertake a quilt and the fabric gods (well, my fabric-loving friends) really came through. i have amassed an impressive pile of oranges and browns. now i just have to decide on a pattern...

hyperbolic crochet; what gives?

in preparation for teaching my first big hyperbolic crochet class, i have decided to pour back through my related resources and write a little rundown of this mathematical handicraft to clarify my thoughts on it. i should start by saying that i am much more of a crocheter than a mathematician, so feel free to pipe up, whiz kids, if there are holes in my understanding or explanations.

my love affair with hyperbolic crochet was ignited on a fateful (in many ways, actually) trip to pittsburgh just under a year ago. jen and leah and i were there for the craft congress and took a free afternoon to go to the warhol museum. their special exhibit was a group show concenring climate change. on top of an amazing installation by the yes men (based on this intervention), there was a huge coral reef made entirely of crochet pieces. obviously, we craft nerds were enthralled. but it got even more interesting as we started to read about the complex mathematics behind this highly organic assemblage of shapes.

the coral reef, as it turns out, was the major installation project of the institute for figuring at that time. the institute itself is a fascinating organization that does a great deal of work bridging tactile reality with more complex and esoteric arts & sciences. in thier own words:

The Institute For Figuring is an organization dedicated to the poetic and aesthetic dimensions of science, mathematics and the technical arts.

by the way, if you just poke around the hyperbolic resources on their website, you probably have a better chance of understanding hyperbolic crochet than i can give you.

leah and i each went home with the iff's new publication, a field guide to hyperbolic space. it's a great book and if any of this piques your interest, you should probably hunt down a copy (here).

oh man, this is where i have to explain the science behind the yarn. this part always freaks me out, so let's make it quick - hyperbolic crochet is the physical modeling of shapes that arise from a branch of mathematics once thought to be impossible (also a branch of mathematics that eventually disproved euclid's grand postulates of geometry - never postulate with grandeur; you will just end up with hyperbolic egg on your face).

as much as i enjoy hurting my brain with the math involved, the history of hyperbolic mathematics and its eventual crochet modeling is even more interesting. after hyperbolic mathematics was finally accepted as real (a long winding road), the challenge was set to create models of hyperbolic space. hyperbolic geometry, by the way, takes it's name from the literary term of hyperbole. in the geometric case, the hyperbole manifests itself in a continuing and constant excess of surface. put plainly, hyperbolic spaces can look all lettucey.



but back to the task of making hyperbolic models...

while these forms are easy enough to represent in two dimension or simulations of three dimension with computers, tactile models were proving harder to create. any brittle material (paper, wood) might indeed be made into a hyperbolic plane with some difficulty, but it could never be manipulated.

enter dr. daina taimina, a latvian mathematician and physicist who decided to pick up a crochet hook in 1997 to make workable hyperbolic models as aids for her students. revolutionary! funnily enough, once explained the basics of hyperbolic forms, even the most novice of crocheters could make just about any hyperbolic plane, but the breakthrough had eluded mathematicians for centuries. what's more, after sewing lines and shapes onto the models, incredibly complex mathematical theories can be easily observed (ie. the behaviors of straight lines and triangles in hyperbolic space).



my mind is too tangled to do justice to advanced geometry at the moment so it's time i left it to the pros and had this all explained to you much more succinctly by the iff.

as an added bonus, after your mind is blown by trying to envision existence in hyperbolic space you can have it double-blown considering the possibility that we may already be existing in it. but i'll leave that to you, dear reader, as i can only be responsible for so many physics-based panic attacks per day and i think i've eaten up too many already by myself.