Serendipity

i have been knitting an ouroborus sweater... (a picture of one can be seen on this page, last photo in second group)
http://www.philosopherswool.com/Pages/DebbieNewCards.htm
Debbie New developed the concept for the ouroborus sweater –she leaves the details of actually knitting it up to each knitter--i like that kind of challage.

i wasn't thrilled with the whole term ouroborus (a word that i have brought up two times here, before it stuck in head, but then, my mind does have sieve like qualities at times.)

then Wolf gave us a bit of organic chemistry—Over in I & A, and suddenly, the name chosen for the sweater, made from a somewhat hexagonal shaped knitting, made sense...
(http://wordsmith.org/board/showflat.pl?Cat=&Board=announcements&Number=1469265

i've read the story of Auguste Kekulé, who first realizing that benzene has a ring structure when he dreamt of snakes biting their own tails, and i now now that what Kekulé dreamt about was an ouroborus. and enough basic organic chemistry has managed to remain in my head to know the simplest shapes for carbon rings are hexagons...

(as in the dodeca-hexa-enoic acid and eicosa-penta-enoic acid—the eicosa-penta-enoic acid has 11 hexagon shaped rings, (and 5 pentagon) and its more commonly identified today as ‘soccer ball shaped’-
(I think doceca–hexa shape has only hexagon rings, but not a lot of organic chemistry had stuck inside the sieve--but the combo of dodeca and hexa is a good clue!—and as a 3D shape is called a dodecahedron)

some photos of my ouroborus sweater (not quite half done) can be seen here:
right half--(clearly 1 half of a sweater) the knit shape is sort of hexagon, but instead of being made from equilateral triangles, (and flat) it’s made up of 6 right angles (yes, 540°) converging at a single center point—and the knitting can not be made to lie flat unless you fold it.
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v299/oftroy/WIPs/righthalfwithlandmarks.jpg
when it is folded, the 6 sided piece folds into a figure with a total of 270°, not 180°--and a different shape, than you might expect.

this center view shows all 6 'wedges' converging. (and you can see, as you move away from the center point, the 'fabric' is not flat, but rippled--it doesn't ripple closer to the center beacuse it doesn't really contine to have 90° angles as it approaches the center point)
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v299/oftroy/WIPs/eyeletEmilyOckercaston.jpg

I love it when I can make weird connections…whodda thought there could be connections between language, organic chemistry and knitting?



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