Current mood:	contemplative
Entry tags:	link collection, nerdy

Knitting for nerds
I'm on a few knitting mailing lists, and lately I've seen two calls for submissions for new books-one of patterns for bigger women, and one for a book for teenagers, which is apparently to include sections for jocks, goth, punks-and nerds.

Which makes me wonder. Why isn't there a book-or at least website-for knitting just for nerds?

Some links to the sorts of patterns which could go in such a thing:

• Knitted nonorientable manifolds: Möbius bands, the klein bottle, and RP².
  • Nate Berglund's one-sided surfaces: a (simple) Möbius scarf, Klein hat, and projective-plane hat. (Very nice ones, too, with no holes.)
  • djinnj's nicer möbius stole and möbius tutorial.
  • A new knit stitch invented just to try to make Möbius scarves more symmetric.
  • Several nice, but unwearable, embeddings. And here's some more!
  • Sarah-Marie's math knit page. A bunch of clothing Möbius bands, Klein bottles, and the real projective plane. These don't have self-intersection; hence the Klein bottle and RP² have holes. (This is why I like Nate Berglund's stuff better.) She also some notes on knitted hyperbolic planes, some braids, and lots of links.
  • My klein bottles
  • Klein bottle hat at Knitty. Not a particularly nice one.
• Crocheting the hyperbolic plane, and a whole gallery of examples
• The Lorenz manifold and a PDF with instructions.
• A crocheted Siefert surface. This is a mathematical surface whose boundary is a knot.
• Woolly Thoughts afghans-lots of cute knitted afghans, mostly multicolored.
• Woolly Thoughts Yahoo! group-cool photos.
• Eleanor Kent has some pretty multicolored knitted swatches that look vaguely contour-like or fractal-like.
• Fibonnacci stripes.
• Penrose diagram on a scarf
• Random cables: conventional cables with random twists, and an overall pattern.
• A Sierpinski shawl (crochet)
• A picture of some Platonic solids crocheted by Miyuki Kawamura. Sadly, nobody has instructions.
• A knitted tetrahedronal dice bag. Now all I need is to work out instructions for one that doesn't involve quite so much seaming.
• Maxwell's equations (in colorwork, down at the bottom.) I think I would like to work out some way of doing this as a cable pattern instead.
• Chemistry:
  • The DNA cable (knit)
  • Three-dimensional stuffed knitted DNA (down at the bottom of the page)
  • DNA illusion scarf (from MagKnits, which is defunct, so I'm linking to the Wayback Machine's page)
  • The periodic table sweater (knit)
  • My knitted molecular diagrams -although other molecules would be cool. (The only ones I've tried so far are porphyrins.) If you want to use porphyrins in particular, leave me a comment and I'll see if I can find the charts I made.
• Flying Spaghetti Monster hat (crochet)
• Crocheted snowflakes (or at least, the six-pointed ones.)
• A knitted uterus
• A crocheted eyeball (warning: PDF file)
• A very nice knit squid
• Knitted brains
• A knitted heart
• A knitted microbe
• More microbes
• The Linux penguin (knit)
• The Binary scarf
• The Mario blanket (Tunisian crochet)
• The LOTR sweater with Fair Isle (knit) runes.
• LOTR cables: The tree of Gondor, tree cables in general, and cabled runes.
• Stuffed Cthulhu, another stuffed Cthulhu, felted Cthulhu mask and a colorwork pattern. (knit)
• The Doctor Who scarf (knit)
• Katamari Damacy hat (knit)

Note: if any of these links are broken, try entering the URL into the Wayback machine.

And some plans:

• Fractal stitch patterns-Sierpinski shawl, Sierpinski carpet, possibly that flow snake from Math Quilts, the dragon curve, Penrose tilings, etc.
• rhitsqueaky suggests space-filling curves and cellular automata.
• Fibonacci-related stuff: domino/square tilings, or a rectangle made of squares with fibonnaci-number-length sides. Or maybe a pentagonal star.
• Come to think of it, if you can do a pentagonal star, you can probably manage the Petersen graph.
• Pythagorean-theorem proof as a little square (or rectangular) pattern. Unfortunately, I think this one may need to be multicolor.
• D₈ afghan. (64 of any non-symmetrical square block can make this one. I originally thought of this as a quilt pattern, but it works here too.)
• Siefert surfaces as bags, tank tops, or just cool thingies (like the hyperbolic plane above)
• Cross-cap mittens
• More polyhedral dice bags. (rhitsqueaky suggests stuffing them and using them as car dice.)
• Crocheted chess pieces
• Escher paintings
• Borromean Rings. I'd base this on Marley or Steve's strap.
• Equations as cables or as stranded colorwork

  Come to think of it, the vast majority of this stuff is mathematical.