A Propensity

It’s been no time and all time.
But,
a frail ink tears out of my pen
to rain this page
with the sere memory of you
(Swan)
and knowing that our days passed by
as the quick game of pool we’ve played
over a beer and a shot of Jack;
I’ll see you on the dust-kicked road
to Greece and a hermitage that you
would share with me.
But,
Rather than lose the wars,
they settled on the spoils of boredom.
But,
Rather than lose faith,
they twisted your spine
into a hangman’s knot to die
(and die)
in the corner by your restless jacket.
But,
It’s been no time and all time.

The poetry of the earth is never dead.
~John Keats

Apparently, the plants in my local park just love to grow themselves into knots. Weird stuff.

About the photo: The camera had a hard time focussing on the little vine, I had to hold my hand behind the plant so the camera wouldn’t focus on the background. I could of course have manually focussed instead, that would’ve worked fine too.

In the Department of Totally Useful Things, a quick tip from Hack College on how to avoid the kinks and twists in your earbuds. Nerds unite.

Cabling a knot isn’t so tricky to imagine. Let’s just consider a tubular neighborhood of the knot.

Glue the top to the bottom. On the left we have the knot, on the right we have a (3,1)-cable… using the straight vertical framing.

Here’s a (3,5)-cable.

It’s not too bad to think about how a Seifert surface extends across the cable.
For a (p,q)-cable, we’ll take p parallel copies of the Seifert surface outside the tubular neighborhood and q copies of the meridional disk in the tubular neighborhood. The signs of p and q tell you the orientations you want on these pieces. Then you attach them together with |pq| twisted bands, twisted in the appropriate direction.

Let’s do this with the (3,1)-cable.

Here’s the knot with it’s Seifert surface hanging off. The surface continues off to the left, but we’re only looking near the knot.

Take a tubular neighborhood and restrict to looking outside it.

For the (3,1)-cable, we’ll take 3 pages and one meridional disk.

Then we’ll attach them with twisted bands so the resulting boundary can run along the cable.

And there you go. But it’s kinda nice to smooth it out.

Smoothing it out also has the benefit of helping you see how cabling extends the fibration of a fibered knot.

The way we’ve been looking a the knot, a fibration looks like this.

With the cable smoothed, we can see how the surface corkscrews upwards to fill in the fibration.

And we can even stack this before gluing the top to the bottom to get other (3,q)-cables. Here’s the fibration of the (3,5)-cable on its side.

You can get the SketchUp model here and take a closer look yourself.

In all things of nature there is something of the marvelous.
~Aristotle

I took a walk today and found this weird knotted guy.

About the photo: I used the macro setting. It was a tricky photo as wind kept blowing other plants into the shot.

Do you like BRIGHT BRIGHT BRIGHT?!  Then you will love this kit!

{click image above to buy this kit}

Supplies: Cosmo Cricket Cosgmo PP & Diecuts, Love Elsie PP, Colorbok CS, Bazzill CS, Staz-on Ink, Autumn Leaves stamps, Marvy Corner Rounder, Paper Salon brads, misc. pop-dots.

Supplies:  Basic Grey PP, Bazzill CS, Marvy Corner Rounder, Zva Flower, Fiskars Circle Punch, Staz-on Ink, Studio G Stamps, Stickles, misc. pop-dots & rhinestones.

Supplies: Bazzill CS, Heidi Swapp PP, Zva Crystals, Studio G stamps, Marvy corner rounder, Stickles, Paper Salon brad, Bonanza Bag of Buttons Citrus button, misc. pop-dots.

Supplies: Bazzill CS, DCWV PP, Love Elsie PP, Stickles, Doodlebug alpha stickers, Prima sprites, Zva pearls, Autumn Leaves stamp, misc. paint & pop-dots.

Supplies: Bazzill CS, Cosmo Cricket PP, Making Memories PP, Stickles, Ranger Glossy Accents, Paper Salon brad, Glimmer Mists-white marshmallow, Fiskars circle punch, Studio G stamp, Staz-on ink, Making Memories Flower, Marvy corner punch, misc. pop-dots.

Supplies: Colorbok CS, DCWV PP, Basic Grey Pearls, Fiskars border edge punch, Zva flower, Fiskars circle punch, Marvy corner rounder, misc. pop-dots, chipboard, & joy button.

Supplies: Bazzill CS, Sam’s Club Paper Stack, Stampendous stamp, Staz-On Ink, Marvy Corner Rounder, Stickles, Prima sprites, Bonanza Bag of Buttons Citrus button, Basic Grey pearls.

Supplies: Bazzill CS, Colorbok CS, Sam’s Club Paper Stack, Miss Elizabeth’s sticker, Doodlebug alpha stickers, Fiskars circle punch, Fiskars border edge punch, Zva flower, Pressed Petals chipboard, Stickles, Marvy corner rounder, misc. rhinestones & pop-dots.

Supplies: Gerber baby food jar, Target Spot card kit Peace metal rimmed tag, Bazzill CS, Scrapworks (?) PP, Prima sprites, Glimmer Mists-white marshmallow, misc. paint.

I altered this little jar to fill with candy as an extra little gift for someone on Christmas. It’s really hard to photograph the effect Glimmer Mists really does on here.  It’s more sparkly sheer versus the opaque white that is showing in this photo.

Thanks for checking out my creations!

Say that 10 times fast! So playing on the nautical theme and my love for vines I have begun designing a print for the wedding as well as some mock invitations. I don’t want to give it all away, so here are some of my drawings and inspiring photos.

การผูกเชือกแบบ Two-Half Hitches

การผูกเชือกแบบ Bowline

การผูกเชือกแบบ Sheet-Bend

Manly Scarf #8: Knotted Rib Scarf

The newest pattern in the Manly Scarf Series has just been posted on the PurpleSage website. You can download the free pattern pdf there.

Like all the other scarves in this series, this one is free too. Just a small way for me to say, “Thanks for supporting my designs!”

The pattern stitch is from the Harmony Guides 450 Knitting Stitches V2 (2004) – Knotted Rib pattern and I’ve added a 4-stitch moss border on either side.

If you just want a quick peek, here’s the pattern worked over 38 sts:

Row 1 {RS}: {k1, p1} twice; p2, *kfb, p4; repeat from * to last 7 sts; kfb, p2, {k1, p1} twice

Row 2: {p1, k1} twice; k2, *p2tog, k4; repeat from *to last 8 sts; p2tog, k2, {p1, k1} twice

All abbreviations, yarn requirements, sizes, etc. are in the pdf on the website.

Since it is mainly purl on the RS and knit on the WS, it does have a tendency to curl along the scarf, so blocking is in order.

RS and WS of Knotted Rib Scarf

Both the RS and WS provide a nice face.

Close-up of Rib pattern stitch

I met Joanna Ruocco at her release gathering for The Mothering Coven. After her reading, she gave me a copy of the latest issue of Birkensnake. She’s one of the editors there and she told me that she had bound the book herself. It’s a lovely object that was both blowtorch-singed, and sprayed, I think, with some kind of toxic (is there any other kind?) fixative.

Birkensnake 2 opens with Michael Stewart’s “The Children’s Factory,” a beguiling short short with no shortage of underlying menace. The factory’s machines here are “run by tiny hands. In the bowels. In the guts. In the very intestinal tract of it…” and the “Devil only knows what their great machine does—other than wheeze and breathe.” Though it easily works as a standalone piece, it also felt like it could be a fragment of a much larger narrative.

An excerpt from Danielle Dutton’s novel A World Called the Blazing World follows. It’s about Margaret Cavendish, a polymath who lived in England in the 17th century. Besides being Duchess of Newcastle-upon-Tyne she was a prolific writer who wrote poetry, philosophy, prose romances, essays, plays, and she also wrote a proto-science fiction novel, The Blazing World. Dutton is a wonderful stylist who writes sentences to luxuriate in:

The trip to Oxford was made in the dead of night. Kisses on the lawn at St. John’s Green. A perfect summer gloom of vegetal bravado: peonies, bugloss, native beetles singing.

[…]

Then someone cleared his throat—and Margaret saw she was in an alternate universe whirring far into space: African servants, poets, dogs in silken caps, platonic ideals, sparkling conversation, aristocratic ladies “half-dressed, like angels,” and ivy-coated quadrangles with womanizing captains, dueling earls, actors.

Blake Butler offers another one of his slipstream journeys in “From now on all I’ll talk about is light”. In a place where “children’s eyes made prisms,” the narrator relates:

The second year I shot a beam out of my eyes: radiance earned purely from my fury over Sister—her whole eyes not quite what whatever—and perhaps concerned slightly for my hymen, undulating, which in the night would keep me up, ragged, counting my inhale, waiting on the rheum. At my emission the children moaned a little, rattling their hands, their own eyes lit as if in midst of replication, one thing I’d taught at last, at least—though in their eyes the light would quickly rupture or make paisley and I would sit us down to practice wishing.

With its strange, internal (or is it infernal?) logic, its assonantal phrases, and bobbing rhythms, it almost doesn’t matter where this story goes. It’s all about the journey, taking in the lay of the land, the mind’s ebb and flow.

Fighting off the inclination to parse out what the five forms are in Rhoads Stevens’s “Five Simple Sentence Forms” is easy when you encounter a paragraph like this one:

I lost. I woodshedded my boat design for three weeks before I decided it was time to try it on a man-made lake. The lake was murky and designed by a man named Murphy. Murphy once cooked my father a meal—one that consisted of manioc and rooster heads. My father considered the coxcombs toothsome.

You know that story “Pop Art” by Joe Hill? It’s about an inflatable boy. (See a beautiful adaptation of it HERE. ) When I read the first sentence of “Matt Briggs’s “Knot” (“I was made out of string”) and the immediate sentences following it I thought I was going to get a similar kind of story with more refractive, language-y elements. The story unravels, but not in the way that I thought it wanted to. Anyway, while it seems undeveloped, reads more like a vignette, Matt Briggs’s “Knot,” is still an imaginative piece that has some gorgeous passages like this one about starfish

wrapped in weeds and kelp. They had more than just five arms. Some of them had six or eight or twelve arms. The arms were long and curled around the starfishes’ bodies in elaborate sweeps. They were orange and brown and russet. The gulls let out piercing cries as they hunted the helpless starfish. Each gull emitted a sound at a regular interval, and their cries overlapped and multiplied creating a jarring, pulsing agitation that spread over the entire beach.

There’s a lot of strangeness in Christopher Boucher’s “Strange Animal: Three Stories.” The narrator in “Cage” dates a woman who “kept her brother in a cage.” A man is foiled by a burrito wrapper in “Strange Animal.” Things get hairy in “Hairy,” a story about a hirsute woman and her suitor.

Caren Gussoff offers a fine cyberpunk junket in her story “Correspondence.”

Matthew Pendleton’s “Someday on Planar Surface” is the longest story in this issue. A world is created in which “the outside,” “the ahead,” and “the behind” are palpable things that encroach, enclose, poke, and threaten. It’s a bizarre world with its own logic:

He continually valued the goods in the tray. All together he had been expecting six pounds. There’s six pounds here and there’s six pounds there. Now even if he got six pounds with no lip it wouldn’t account for the distance of his delivery, the way back. Not the real costs maybe, but time, that meant something, made him feel tired. He found a seat and thought of resting there, maybe for several days, letting a morning catch him up, maybe slowly coming across a morning he could participate in. Everyone so half-collapsed all the time with the goods on them, it takes a different mind to think there are things around him saying: it is OK, what happens happens, then it manages into a sort of multi-dimensional puzzle, and solves itself too quickly to see; some voices could describe this sort of thing, when he was most optimistic, or in need of it, optimism, which required a clear view of the ahead, with only the known and surmountable obstacles.

That was when he was sleeping, most optimistic – removed from the world – but when awake he had the idea, it went like this: if I can create of my time a physical artefact, might it be sold and act as leverage for a perpetual sales walk ahead, and the tray and contents, its mass of profit increase boundlessly, grow heavy, bend the web of the world, and then he would see the edges of things wiped out (the certainty of profit causing the certainty of the ahead)?

Miles Klee’s “Dogfight” is a clever story that will make an excellent companion to Sean Lovelace’s “Charlie Brown’s Diaries: Excerpts.” I especially enjoyed this section:

Borrowed Dreams

Visions of engaging the Beagle. Stacks his oddly human teeth in towers, shakes into life the invisible gun. We set the sky ablaze, weave black zigzags across golden dusk. He climbs to a stall and plummets past, black ears trilling, face blank canvas, lifts goggles to reveal all-pupil eyes. Awake in pre-dawn, remember Mannie Red is his own worst foe. A yellow bird alights on the windowsill, speaking spells. Outside, Red stares at toy plane—jammed just out of reach in skeletal tree.

Evelyn Hampton’s “Sag: A Saga” is full of recursive sentences that eddy along in wonderful rhythms and internal rhymes, assonance, and alliterative flair:

We were married in a garden of stone, a few flowers, fewer hours each day after, until darkness was our only and every hour, and every light in our home had to be brightly on. There was something the matter with his vision—he saw far, but only into himself, where he found himself looking back and laughing.

There’s the flight of f’s in “few flowers, fewer,” the rhyming of “flowers” and “hours,” of “our” and “hour,” the assonance of “with his vision,” and the lolling quality of connecting in “himself looking back and laughing,” its assonance and alliteration the perfect ending to a serpentine sentence.

“Tumor Flats,” by Joyelle McSweeney,” is also filled with great sentences:

I wore a standup collar, fake hair, I had a velvet repel, I was shooting up life by the spoonful, but then my grind grew a rind that grew bitter and bitterer till my gears just went rust. Now I’m practically incarcerated in my recliner, glimming the smear world through a rip in my sack. But through this nick in my glass I spy the bright world, the little kids heavy with knowledge, their necks stalked, they need a constant tumor tutor to hold their throats open, check the lines that change their fluids, run the chemical baths.

From her expressive usage of the comma that helps these sentences to tumble along to the various repetitions and rhymes, McSweeney is, as always, an engaging stylist.

Birkensnake 2 is available for free HERE.

I always find white text on a black background difficult to read so it’s all the more reason to get the fuzzy fine-looking object in your hands. You may purchase it HERE.

The narrow centimetre-wide straps of Thongweed, Himanthalia elongata (L.) Gray, over two metres in length, are shed from the basal disc of this species of seaweed when the reproductive products are ripe. Vast quantities of these seaweed tapes are washed onto Jurassic Coast seashores. They are often turned and tossed by the waves - rolled around until they become tangled and knotted. The photographs show a selection of the naturally-occurring knots, skeins, patterns, and arrangements of this olive-green seaweed. These accumulations of weed were found on the pebbles, stones and gravels of shingle beaches in Dorset. 

© Jessica Winder and Jessica’s Nature Blog, 2009. Unauthorised use and/or duplication of this material, including both text and photographs, without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Jessica Winder and Jessica’s Nature Blog with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

 Photographs in this blog are copyright property of Jessica Winder with all rights reserved

They were used as decoration with Hanbok

Picture taken at Korean traditional knot making event in Deoksugung

A Tatoo for a friend who wanted earth, air, fire and water. I started with a basic color idea and moved into a more literal presentation upon her request.

I like the bottom two the best.

A few years ago, at the height of the dot-com era, some people were sounding the death knell for the tie. It had out-lived its purpose and was overly formal at a time when CEOs were wearing golf shirts to the office. However, tales of the tie’s demise were a tad premature as it has once again stormed back onto the corporate scene. For me, the tie is the part of a wardrobe where you can take some chances (if you want), even in a corporate environment. If you are wearing traditional and neutral colours for your suit and shirt (such as a charcoal suit and a solid white shirt), the sky is effectively the limit when it comes to the tie. If you wish to wear an orange tie with a white shirt and charcoal suit, you will likely look very dapper. In the same way that you likely wouldn’t want to paint your walls bright orange and buy an electric blue couch, it’s better to go neutral with big things (suits and shirts) and have the visual interest come from the accent pieces. So, if you’re a guy who likes a bit of flash, then the mistake is to use your suit and shirt; rather, your canvas should be your tie.

Personally, I tend to wear predominantly blue ties (but that is purely a personal preference). Furthermore, I tend to wear dark, simple ties, as I believe a simple look tends to be a more elegant and simple way to dress. There are a number of distinct issues when it comes to ties and will attempt to cover each in turn: first, there is when a tie should be worn; second, what width your tie should be; finally, how to match the pattern of your tie with your shirt and suit.

Tie widths are another important consideration. There has been a trend, as of late, towards narrower ties. As is generally the case, you don’t want to be on either extreme, with a tie so narrow as to serve as a back-up shoelace, or Michael Irvin wide. I would go slightly narrower than you might have previously (somewhere in the range of 3.5 inches). Most ties currently for sale trend towards being narrow and so you shouldn’t have much trouble finding a tie in this width. The reason why I would encourage you to buy ties in the 3.5 inch range (or less, although slightly wider is fine) stems from the fact that  suits now tend to have relatively narrow lapels and thus your tie should be in line with this. I wouldn’t worry about it too much and I myself do not wear a tie that one would call “narrow”, but I certainly don’t wear one that can be described as wide. My favourite ties come from Ralph Lauren Purple Label and Charvet, and both manufacturers create a range of ties that would fit the bill for anyone (and, best of all, are available on Ebay in classic patterns at prices around $50, a savings of around $125).

In terms of when a tie should be worn, I have my own rule. If I’m wearing lace-up shoes, I wear a tie. If I’m wearing loafers, that tends to mean that the occassion is not so formal as to require a tie, and so I often wear an unbuttoned dress shirt under my suit. In my mind, so long as you have a fairly good sense as to when lace-up shoes and loafers are generally the right choice, this rule should serve you quite well. Obviously, your office dress code should play an even larger role in instructing you as to whether a tie is required. Some occasions that always require a tie are weddings (that don’t take place on a beach), funerals, bar/bat mitzfahs (someone please correct me on my spelling) and graduations. Pretty much any other time is something of a judgment call.

Finally, the most important of these issues, at least in my mind, is matching patterns. Between the shirt, suit and tie, you have the possibility for three distinct patterned items of clothing (not including a pocket square, although I always wear a plain white one when I wear one). You could also have no patterns at all (meaning that the shirt, suit and tie are all solid colours). The most traditional and safest approach would be to have one or two patterns at any one time. Having no patterns is a very formal look (not to mention boring) and, surpringly, might not be particularly suitable for the office. To match three distinct patterns is the advanced class  and can sometimes look quite good. At worst, it can make you look like a jackass and the primary goal of this site is to prevent you from looking like a jackass (hopefully without having to spend too much money). The easiest possible combination would be a solid suit (say charcoal), a solid white shirt and then a patterned tie. No matter what pattern tie you choose, it stands a good chance of looking good.

However, imagine you were to wear a pinstripe suit. I would suggest that it would be easiest to wear a solid shirt and then a tie with dots or another repetitive, non-striped design. If you want to wear a striped tie, makes sure to make the stripes of the tie different from the pinstripes of the suit, both in terms of spacing and width. You could mix in a striped shirt, but then you would have three distinct patterns of stripes and would have to make sure that each are differing widths and scales. Frankly, that is overly complicated – the amount of time you would spend matching stripe widths could be applied to more worthwhile pursuits, like sleeping in an extra 5 minutes in the morning. Save the striped shirt for a day where you’ll be wearing a solid suit. I would also caution against wearing checked clothing with stripes. This leads to lots of lines going in all different directions and rarely fails to look busy. Again, the foundation of your wardrobe should be solid suits and shirts, particularly at the beginning, so rather than cramming all of your patterned clothing into one, overwhelmingly patterned outfit, spread them out a bit. Furthermore, the most useful tie you can own is one with a subtle pattern, such as small dots. These can be worn with striped suits or shirts, checked suits or shirts and solid suits or shirts. In other words, they take the thinking out of getting dressed at 6:30AM, pre-morning coffee, and allow you to generally avoid looking like a jackass.

In terms of tie colour, you have a few options. First, if you’re wearing neutral shirts and suits, you can pretty much do what you like. Otherwise, there are a few things to consider. First, one option is if you wear shirts with stripes or checks in a given colour, have your tie pick up that colour. Second, always  make sure that your tie is darker than your shirt (which, as you may notice, effectively rules out wearing a black dress shirt to work; for further discussions on the subject of black shirts, refer to Corporate Style Part 2). I’m not entirely sure why, but this rule of thumb never fails to make one look more professional. Finally, and this is more a personal belief and not something that I would get up and preach about, but I tend to wear dark coloured ties. As has been discussed previously, darker colours tend to be more conservative and thus more “business-like” in appearance. Furthermore, most guys just look cooler and generally better in darker, richer colours. This is a very cliched reference right now, but one can’t help but notice how well-dressed the stars of AMC’s Mad Men are; note the next time you watch it that they almost all wear dark ties. This is not coincidental.

Here are some really great deals at NewportNews.com

Not only are the prices awesome, but I am in LOVE with all of these shoes!!!

I had to start out with these because they are definitely my favorite. I WILL be buying these….I just don’t know which color!

Which color do you like the best?

Elegant satin pump

ON SALE FOR $49.00 (originally $64.00)

These are my second favorite. I feel like I should wear them at Christmas.

Sueded platform pump

ON SALE FOR $34.00 (originally $44.00)

I think these are cute, but I actually prefer the black and white ones. WAY CUTER!

Check out the link above to see the other colors.

High-heel boot

ON SALE FOR $44.00 (originally $59.00)

I love love love these boots! They are so fabulous!

Which is your favorite??

• bamboo knot picks
• quantity-50

Product Description
These bamboo skewers measure 4.5″ long and include a knot at one end. The cocktail picks are great for hors d’oeuvres, finger foods, and more.Pack of 50

50 Count Bamboo knot Picks

Alana Forest from Australia has developed new and creative ideas for the labyrinth.

The ways are crossing and looks like being knotted. At first sight this seems to be a maze, because there are crossroads. However, they are not intended as those. Rather one should always go straight ahead, not branch off  to the right or to the left. One can figure the labyrinth three-dimensional, like the lanes in a motorway interchange.

Hence, the way right into the labyrinth is unequivocal and certainly leads into the centre. The way out from the labyrinth is the same and, nevertheless, another. If I was in the centre of the labyrinth and want to go outside again, I must turn back and take the same path. And, nevertheless, something has changed. The drawings should make this clear.

The way in

The way out

A Chinese proverb says: A way is made by walking. This is applicable here literally.

You will find quite more versions of labyrinth designs on Alana Forest’s website.

We’re so happy to announce that our former co-worker, Lindsay tied the knot recently! Bryan & Lindsay had some really unique & personal elements at their wedding… Her brother, aunt, and father sang throughout and we can’t forget to mention the very cool groom & groomsmen attire! Big congrats to you both!

Photographed by Gary.

Click here to learn more about weddings at Rockwood Mansion.

Yay!! We’ve got rings in store now. (:
We’ve got bracelets and of course we need rings as well.
The above picture is to show you how the ring looks like.

The Climbing dictionary is now up and running, I will aim to update this  as often as I can. I think it is fairly definitive but will seek out any words not in there!

Quick picture before I head to bed. At our wedding, we chose to do a handfasting. It’s a Celtic tradition where cords are draped over the hands of the bride and groom and lightly tied, binding the couple together. The bride and groom let go of each other’s hands and the cords are then tied in a knot, hence the phrase “tying the knot.” We’re eventually going to place the knot somewhere special, but for now, they’re just hanging from our shelf.