Seven Score

You know how you sometimes get very caught up in weird conversations? As we were driving home from the cottage, the subject of birthdays came up. The Gambler said that maybe he would turn 40 this year (rather than 2 years from now) to get it over with. I made the comment that the only reason why the ages of 20, 30, 40, 50 etc caused so much angst was that they ended in zeros. I pointed out that if our numbering system was base 7 rather than base 10, that we would have totally different milestone years to dread. (I have no idea why I picked base 7 *- maybe it was fate) We then got in an argument heated debate over what base 10 number was the equivalent of 100 in base 7. The Gambler said it was 70, I said it was 49. To try to prove my point, I counted out loud in base 7 as I kept track of the (base 10) number of digits I had spoken with my fingers. Which is harder to do than you would think it might be. We were still doing the "70" "No, 49" "No, it's 70" thing when I started to laugh at the absurdity of it all. Anyways. Pictures. Knitting. How about some pictures of knitting? Not my knitting - here are 2 knit garments on display at the Victoria & Albert Museum. They were from an exhibition of the collections of the 2008 Royal Collage of Art Fashion graduates. This dress was knit out of triple stranded Rowan Polar; the designer used the custom made needles shown behind the garment to knit it. I wonder how large her tension swatch was. This dress is machine knit. The neat thing about it is that the trompe l'oeil zipper is not printed onto the fabric, but it was programmed into the actual design using 4 different shades of yarn (apparently the maximum number of separate yarns that can be used with this particular knitting machine). So theoretically, it could be reproduced in handknitting using either stranded or intarsia techniques. Which is cool. To me at least. But then again, I get all worked up about wacky things like numbers. *I never did watch more than a single episode of Dr Who in my formative years - I was more into Monty Python. Which is a good thing, since I don't know how long it would take me to knit the requisite scarf.