Really cool pictures

OK, there was no knitting and no blogging, but I was certainly having fun. I got to use the scanning electron microscope on my fiber samples and take lots of pictures. I know it's not the same as knitting, but they're fiber, OK? Bear with me.

This is my absolute favorite, it's angora bunny:



Not only do these fibers have a symmetric and even scaling pattern, they are also thinner than silk. Just so you can compare, here's two other fiber samples:

              

One of them is wool, the other one is dog, can you tell them apart?

I put these and other pictures along with a lot of information in a wiki. Go take a peek if you have time and tell me what you think: http://textilefibers.pbwiki.com/

Meanwhile, I promise to work some more on the pink thing.

Chugging along

It bugs me that I came close to finishing this project and now I'm back to almost the beginning:



I need to keep working on it before I get tired (once more) of all that pink.

I've also been working with my fiber samples and hopefully this weekend I'll get some Microscopy pictures. Here's a cool picture of the plasma sputtering process:


That purple cloud is a bunch of ions coming up from the bottom mixed up with the metal atoms being "sputtered" from the top under vacuum.

More Samples

Thanks to Custom Handweavers, I now have more samples for the electron microscope: Llama, alpaca, mohair, angora and cotton. The big white vial in the middle contains soy silk, which I may or may not use.

I have already mounted last weeks samples on carbon film:


And I will now proceed to sputter-coat them with a gold/palladium alloy. They will look more or less like this:



That's my own hair and some insect eggs. You need to coat the samples to make them conductive, otherwise you cannot see them in the electron microscope.

I have, of course, ripped the front of the lace tee and I am now in the process of knitting it again. What a pain! Eventually I'll get to ripping the back too.