Yeah Spring! Along with the daffodils, new issues of online knitting magazines are popping up all over the place. This week the latest issue of Knitty hit the net and it’s filled with 17 fresh new patterns to brighten up your knitting basket.

Embroidery is hot and the cover sweater (pictured here) incorporates it nicely. There’s also a great guy sweater, something that’s always difficult to find in my opinion, and who doesn’t like a good knit sea creature?

But don’t forget the features! There is a wonderful article on seaming and another on repairing knitwear. There’s even one on dyeing in your dishwasher!

In other news, there’s a new online knitting & crochet magazine I wanted to tell you about — For the Love of Yarn. They just put out their premiere issue and it includes four patterns — check out the cute little amigurumi snail.

Here are some images of the new Amy Butler line, Belle. The word is that is will be available mid-June and it’s her first collection with Rowan, after leaving Freespirit this fall. Rowan is the home of Kaffe Fasset’s line of fabrics as well.

There is a bit more Amy Butler info over here at Quilter’s Buzz regarding the collection, where Amy has been a guest blogger for a bit. It looks like a nice group of fabrics, floral patterns with some coordinating stripes, inspired by “garden sanctuaries” and I can see some classic Chinese influence in there too.

She also has a new book, In Stitches, published by Chronicle Books coming out this fall, and a new stationary line, wow! Busy busy gal!

Usually, I am not drawn to children’s crafts, simply because I don’t have kids and I don’t spend that much time thinking about it. But there’s something about puppets that are so appealing to me, even just to think about making. Perhaps it’s my own childhood muppets nostalgia. Regardless, here are some fun puppet resources in case you are inclined to put on a puppet show for any kids in your life, or heck, just for yourself:

Puppet 101, in which a professional puppet maker (btw is that not an awesome job!) documents step-by-step how he makes puppets (via drawn)

Along the same lines is projectpuppet.com which publishes simple patterns to make professional looking puppets.

Download and construct your own paper puppet bunny rabbit theatre (via meggiecat)

Amazing ideas for a home puppet theater and a traveling finger puppet theater from amy at angry chicken.

Knitted fingerpuppet patterns at knitty and more here or try crochet fairytale finger puppets at crochet me

announcing the theme for week 1.
Go to the whip up whiplash comp page for more info on entering, prizes, sponsors, buttons and to upload your entry link.

Week 1. This weeks challenge theme is everyday creativity

You have 4 days to complete the challenge - post it on your blog and upload the link - entries will close on Monday 7am GMT. Please make sure you understand how to post your link and that you are posting the permalink to the static post page and not the link to the main blog page - this is the page where the comments for that post can be viewed. Please also read tips on photographing your challenge - good photos make viewing your challenge easier and will give you a headstart in the points. And make sure you have the whiplash button in your post - this is a double check for us that we are viewing the correct post and of course spreads the word.

‘Add this link’ will be open for adding your link at 7am GMT time 13 April (use this time zone converter to find out what the time is in your part of the world) (12am PDT, 5pm AEST).

Entries will be judged on 3 main criteria - skill, humour and originality - you must illustrate the strengths of your project using only 3 images - a close up image is good to show the skill involved and an in use image might be good to illustrate the humour of the project.

Jeffrey Yamaguchi has donated 4 copies of his book ‘52 Projects‘, ‘random acts of everyday creativity’, to be given away.

Come back tomorrow where I will be discussing this book.

Sponsored by … check out these fantastic supporters of whip up.

It is not often that a serious mathematics journal contains a crochet pattern, Dr Osinga and Prof Krauskopf have provided the pattern in the journal Mathematical Intelligencer. (link to the pdf document of the paper and the pattern is here.) They are challenging anyone to make their own crochet chaos model (theres a bottle of champers in it for you). info frombbc news

Extract from the paper:

The Lorenz attractor is the best known image of a chaotic or strange attractor. We are concerned here with its close cousin, the two-dimensional stable manifold of the origin of the Lorenz system, which we call the Lorenz manifold for short. This surface organizes the dynamics in the three-dimensional phase space of the Lorenz system. … We have been working for quite a while on the development of algorithms to compute global manifolds in vector fields and have computed the Lorenz manifold up to considerable size. Its geometry is very intriguing and we explored different ways of visualizing it on the computer. However, a real model of this surface was still lacking. … We start from a small disc in the stable eigenspace of the origin and add at each step a band of a fixed width. In other words, at any time of the calculation the computed part of the Lorenz manifold is a topological disc whose outer rim is (approximately) a level set of the geodesic distance from the origin. What we realized then and there is that the mesh generated by our algorithm can directly be interpreted as chrochet instructions!

About the authors:
Hinke Osinga learnt crocheting, and other handcraft techniques, from her mother around the age of seven. A bit later she got a Ph.D. in Mathematics … The Lorenz manifold is her first project that combines handcraft with mathematics.
Bernd Krauskopf works in the general area of dynamical systems theory, the basic idea of how to grow a global manifold emerged over a bagel with Hinke at a bagel store on Nicolette Mall.

This is not the only combination of craft and maths out there. In 1997 Cornell University mathematician Daina Taimina finally worked out how to make a physical model of hyperbolic space that allows us to feel the tactile properties of this unique geometry. The method she used was crochet. Read more about why crochet works so well here, gallery of the various models here, interview with Daina Taimina here.

resources:
interweave
new york times
bbc news
chaotic crochet at plus maths
university of bristol
crochet fantasy
instructions on crocheting the hyperbolic plane
mathematical knitting