I need a uniquely curved shape for a design I want to do.  The design is based on the structure of the rhinovirus.  Huh?  Where did that idea come from?  Well, somewhat recently there was an online news article about the mapping of the rhinovirus genome.  I posted the reference to the TemariChallenge Yahoo group and we had a nice little chat about how the structure of many of the viruses seemed to lend themselves to temari designs.  There are several different views of the virus (and others!) available on the internet.  The picture used in the article didn’t quite give me the definition that I wanted so I went looking for other views.  Check out this site and this one too if you are interested.  (Those links will open in a new window.)  One view that I found seems to have the star in more of a swirled shape… something like this maybe:

I think it would be beautiful on a temari but I’ve been struggling with how to stitch it.  I can get the stars offset with each other so that they appear to be swirled but it doesn’t quite give me what I want in the design.  I am stitching out a design based on that anyway, using sakasa uwagake stars (stars with kiku herringone on all points) and it occured to me that it should be possible to get the shape I really want by some judicious shaping of the uwagake stitches.  I don’t feel like doing the experimentation on this ball since I have already done so much ripping out, but I forsee a big play with the idea of shaping the ‘cone’ of the uwagake stitches in the future.  

I’ve already done that a little bit a long time ago as I learned the stitch on my first kiku designs.  My early attempts were narrow and tight.  They did not quite have the nice diagonal shaping that so many kiku designs have.  Then I worked really hard to get that nice even diagonal, slowly expanding from the sharp point to a nice wide base.  Now I think it is time to revisit the idea of the ‘perfect kiku shape’.  Playing with the tension and placement of my stitches should give me some interesting effects that I can use for creative designs.  And maybe, I can use it to create that swirly star that I want.  I don’t think I’ve ever seen something like this done on temari yet… has anyone out there seen it?

I’ve added a new category to the blog: Orts. In case some of you are not familiar with the term I thought I would take a minute to explain.

In the needlework world some people refer to the little pieces of thread left over from a project as orts. I don’t know when they started using the term but it is one that I really like. I always thought it had a science origin but it turns out that what I was thinking of was just a happy coincidence.

I looked up ‘orts’ in the dictionary (Websters, online) and found that it is an archaic term from about the 1400 to 1500 time period referring to bits of food left on the plate after a meal. Eww! Not exactly what I think of when I look at the pretty little orts jar sitting next to my sewing spot. It makes me glad that we needleworkers have grabbed it and given it a nicer meaning.

fragments of a comet nucleus drift in the icy reaches of the Oort Cloud, far from the sun. - artwork copyright 2009 by Don Dixon/cosmographica.com and used with permission

Actually, I always thought of the term coming from Astronomy and the Oort Cloud.  What is that?  The Oort Cloud is a collection of objects that lie at the boundary of our solar system at the limit of the Sun’s gravity.  They are thought to be the remnants of the matter that originally coalesced into our planets and moons.  The theory about it was proposed by a Dutch astronomer, Jan Oort, in 1950.  (For more info check out the NASA page or the Wikipedia page.)  Some sources discuss it like it is a proven theory, while others are careful to point out that it is a hypothesis that nicely explains observations and some conundrums that astronomers have run into.

So, it turns out that the Oort Cloud (which you could think of as being the orts from the building of the solar system) is really only connected to needlework orts by the happy coincidence of the scientist’s name.  Weird.

I still like thinking of my needle work orts in the Oort Cloud way.  I like the idea that they are the remnants that remain after creating something wonderful.  Somehow it just seems a little more romantic than bits of food left on a plate after a meal.

So, what about my Orts category?  Well, that is for the bits and pieces that come out of my mind that don’t get grabbed by the gravity of the other categories.  I could have named the category Miscellaneous but that just didn’t strike me to be as true a name as Orts.  But I wonder now if I should change the spelling and make it Oorts?

Disclaimer:  I am not a physisist.  The extent of my knowledge of physics comes from my college Physics 101 course (years and years ago), various reading material that catches my eye and National Geographic or Discovery TV shows.  Oh, and there’s always a little bit of it in sci fi books too but they don’t really count.  :-)  If you are a real physicist and I got something wrong, please feel free to correct me in the comments.

Simply put, entropy is a measure of disorder.  It is part of the 2nd law of Thermodynamics which states – basically – that the entropy in a closed system will always increase over time.  You can make things more organized, but it will require you to put energy into the system.

This makes sense to me.  I think about entropy just about every time I open one of the drawers that house my stash of temari threads (… or look in my garage, or walk into my husband’s workshop, or glance at quite a few of the horizontal surfaces in my house).  I put energy into the system when I take the time to move the threads around and organize them by color or by type, but somehow the next time I open that drawer they are always just a tad messier than they were when I left them.  sigh.  What can I say?  The laws of the Universe are battling against me.

So what does entropy have to do with temari?  The way I see it, doing temari (or making thimble rings or knitting or…) is a constant battle against ever increasing entropy.  By putting a little energy or work into the system I can decrease the possibilities for things to rearrange themselves into disorder.  In temari talk… I take the time to pull some threads and stitch them onto the ball in nice patterns and then they can no longer get all tangled with the other threads.  :-)  Some of the temari I make do not quite reduce the entropy of the threads as much as I would like (messy stitches, badly matched corners…) while others make me smile with delight as I see a beautiful symmetry emerge.

I find it interesting that my tolerance for high entropy changes over time.  There are days when I am just fine with everything around me being all willy nilly and other days when it drives me crazy that things just won’t line up and stay put!  Sometimes I am happy with sloppy stitching, and other times I will rip something out five times to get it to look just right on the temari.

I love that science has given me a name to apply to the disorder around me.  Ah, entropy!