side lacing without slits

Sometime back I helped Harlequin with their new costumes for the Abbey Medieval Festival, and in the course of the project wound up trying something new for the side lacing on one of the bliauts. Their singer is more buxom than I, so I couldn't use my normal technique of doing the body rectangle as wide as the shoulder points and then remove enough fabric to make it fit the sides and lace shut. So instead I used the sort of side-gore that is shaped rather like a rocket--a triangular peak in the armpit, a rectangle down the sides, widening to triangle skirt gores at the base. (I got this style of gore from a Pictish stone (thanks eithni! I can't find my copy of the photo at the moment :-( but it shows three men in tunics, with three different skirt gores clearly visible, and this style is one of them. No idea if they'd still be using it in the 12th century or not, but it is a good way of both having the body rectangle only as wide as the shoulders, and having the fabric reach all the way around the body.)

I had first thought that we'd just slit the sides and lace them shut, particularly as I created the side-gores by ( this cutting diagram )

so one side would be slit already. However, when it came time to assemble the gown, we decided it would be easier to sew the two halves together first, and then attach it to the dress as a single piece.

So rather than unpicking the side seam and slitting the center of the side without a center seam, we decided to try something different. We had those seams on either side of the the gore, so I sewed down some extra fabric, edges folded in to keep it from fraying, to those seams, leaving lacing gaps. ( The result )

side lacing without slits

Sometime back I helped Harlequin with their new costumes for the Abbey Medieval Festival, and in the course of the project wound up trying something new for the side lacing on one of the bliauts. Their singer is more buxom than I, so I couldn't use my normal technique of doing the body rectangle as wide as the shoulder points and then remove enough fabric to make it fit the sides and lace shut. So instead I used the sort of side-gore that is shaped rather like a rocket--a triangular peak in the armpit, a rectangle down the sides, widening to triangle skirt gores at the base. (I got this style of gore from a Pictish stone (thanks eithni! I can't find my copy of the photo at the moment :-( but it shows three men in tunics, with three different skirt gores clearly visible, and this style is one of them. No idea if they'd still be using it in the 12th century or not, but it is a good way of both having the body rectangle only as wide as the shoulders, and having the fabric reach all the way around the body.)

I had first thought that we'd just slit the sides and lace them shut, particularly as I created the side-gores by ( this cutting diagram )

so one side would be slit already. However, when it came time to assemble the gown, we decided it would be easier to sew the two halves together first, and then attach it to the dress as a single piece.

So rather than unpicking the side seam and slitting the center of the side without a center seam, we decided to try something different. We had those seams on either side of the the gore, so I sewed down some extra fabric, edges folded in to keep it from fraying, to those seams, leaving lacing gaps. ( The result )

silly contest idea

An e-mail went around the university today, looking for science graduate students to present their research in a silly manner in a "90 seconds of fame" contest, with props encouraged, but no PowerPoint slides--it isn't meant to be your typical science presentation. I'm not certain if I will commit to entering the contest or not (it is on this Friday), but I was inspired to write up the following draft of what I'd say if I do:

Tasmania has a reputation as a casual, laid-back, no stress, no worries kind of place, which has caused any number of folks from the mainland to drive up our property values in search of the good life. But it hasn’t always been like this. Once, a long time ago, (about 510 million years ago—or just yesterday to us geologists) what is now the beautiful western mountains of Tasmania was naught more than a bunch of mud on an ocean floor, driven under Tasmania by the collision of another block of land, experiencing more stress than even a PhD student can imagine undergoing. But just as we, when faced with impossible deadlines and numerous equipment failures somehow manage to knuckle under and produce brilliant papers for publication, so that old mud managed to pull itself together to grow garnets of unusual size and great beauty before springing resiliently back to the surface. So the next time you think “I just can’t take the stress any more”, remember Tasmania’s mountains, which underwent pressures of 14 thousand bars and 700 degrees C to create such beauty.

silly contest idea

An e-mail went around the university today, looking for science graduate students to present their research in a silly manner in a "90 seconds of fame" contest, with props encouraged, but no PowerPoint slides--it isn't meant to be your typical science presentation. I'm not certain if I will commit to entering the contest or not (it is on this Friday), but I was inspired to write up the following draft of what I'd say if I do:

Tasmania has a reputation as a casual, laid-back, no stress, no worries kind of place, which has caused any number of folks from the mainland to drive up our property values in search of the good life. But it hasn’t always been like this. Once, a long time ago, (about 510 million years ago—or just yesterday to us geologists) what is now the beautiful western mountains of Tasmania was naught more than a bunch of mud on an ocean floor, driven under Tasmania by the collision of another block of land, experiencing more stress than even a PhD student can imagine undergoing. But just as we, when faced with impossible deadlines and numerous equipment failures somehow manage to knuckle under and produce brilliant papers for publication, so that old mud managed to pull itself together to grow garnets of unusual size and great beauty before springing resiliently back to the surface. So the next time you think “I just can’t take the stress any more”, remember Tasmania’s mountains, which underwent pressures of 14 thousand bars and 700 degrees C to create such beauty.

a new sample

I started typing up a new sample today, one which I first analysed back in 2005 during the microprobe session in which my advisor introduced me to the "probe" and what one does with it, and then went back to probe that sample again other, more recent occasions. What I hadn't noticed until today, when I created a figure showing the two different garnet grains (which were analysed in different probe sessions) side by side, with the graphs of their composition linked to the spots on the grain, is that they are *very* different, both in their appearance and in their composition.

Alas, I can't share a photo, because although CorelDraw exported it as a .jpg which I can open on my computer, when I tried uploading it, I got an error message and it is much too late to try to solve the problem tonight. So suffice it to say that just describing the sample, and the chemical composition of the two very different garnets within it took 732 words. I've got much more to describe with respect to the other minerals (I hadn't realized until today that I'd never actually done anything with the results for this samples "inclusion" probe session, so I spent much of the day simply working out what each inclusion within the garnet that I'd analysed is.) intrigued

a new sample

I started typing up a new sample today, one which I first analysed back in 2005 during the microprobe session in which my advisor introduced me to the "probe" and what one does with it, and then went back to probe that sample again other, more recent occasions. What I hadn't noticed until today, when I created a figure showing the two different garnet grains (which were analysed in different probe sessions) side by side, with the graphs of their composition linked to the spots on the grain, is that they are *very* different, both in their appearance and in their composition.

Alas, I can't share a photo, because although CorelDraw exported it as a .jpg which I can open on my computer, when I tried uploading it, I got an error message and it is much too late to try to solve the problem tonight. So suffice it to say that just describing the sample, and the chemical composition of the two very different garnets within it took 732 words. I've got much more to describe with respect to the other minerals (I hadn't realized until today that I'd never actually done anything with the results for this samples "inclusion" probe session, so I spent much of the day simply working out what each inclusion within the garnet that I'd analysed is.) intrigued