Ohio Regimental Military Ball - 2014

Dear Ladies and Gentlemen,

This weekend I enjoyed a most charming dance in Canton, Ohio! This was my second time attending, and once again had a fabulous time.
The ball is held once a year in Canton, at the McKinley Grand hotel, usually some time right around Valentine's Day.
I went to the LINK: National First Ladies' Library, Museum, and Saxton McKinley House, which is right across from the hotel. Luckily, tours are available (if you call ahead) Tuesday through Saturday. I was lucky and had the 9:30 tour all to myself, which means I got to ask a lot of questions!

Taken from across the street. This is the Saxton McKinley House, now a museum, with a tour guided by a costumed docent.

As viewed from my hotel window (8th floor)

And as viewed from my window on Sunday morning when a snow system came through! Really pretty fat flakes...

Of course, while the museum was great, it was not the primary reason I had driven to Canton! I was there for a ball!
In the afternoon, though, as things were getting going, I helped out with the registration tables. To do that, I wore a day dress. A friend did my hair for me - a first, since I'm pretty picky about how it feels on my head! She did a fabulous job (thanks, Melissa!).

My "Memorial Day Dress" you may recognize! (I just realized - this shows up in my post about LINK: Fall Reenactments/Zoar 2013, and in the post about LINK: the parade at Remembrance Day in Gettysburg 2013, but I seem to have forgotten to give it its own post, showing the adventures I had constructing the darn thing! Well, I know what's next...)

How my hair was done. A Y-shaped part, with my side hair being twisted under and pulled back across my ears, and my back hair being braided and coiled into a bun. The ribbon accent was pinned atop my head, then the side hair twists were wrapped around the bun in the back and secured with even more pins. It held beautifully the whole night!

 After my hair had been arranged, as I said, I manned the registration table for a bit, then glanced at the tables that the vendors had set up.
There were also some fun parlor games, like "Postman" and "Minister's Cat"!
After the parlor games, there were refreshments, and before dinner, I went up to change into my ballgown! It is the LINK: silk one I posted about last November, which I also wore to LINK: Remembrance Day in Gettysburg.

The only picture of myself in my dress that I have from this event. Bah! That's what I get for having so much fun dancing for 5 hours that I forget I own a camera... which is fine, it's not period correct (but that's largely ignored. Cameras are less incongruous to see, for me, than last year when there were two Lincolns in attendance. Now that was strange!).
Note that I added the line of LINK: red ribbon trim (made the same way as my hair piece) across the bodice.
I still have a few minor adjustments I wish to do to this dress, and to the pattern before I make the next dress, but overall I am very pleased with how it turned out!

On Sunday, when I headed home, it snowed royally. Not enough to snow me in, but enough for some beautiful pictures of snowflakes on the windowsills!

Beautiful snow :D

Most sincerely yours,
~ Sarah

Winter Hats, Part III: Mathematical Shapes (Mobius and Klein bottle)

Part III of winter hats is here! And this time it's math-based. Remember Part I? It featured a blue hat? Well, I had yarn left over, in prodigious amounts. So I decided to make something for myself. I had seen a Mobius scarf, which I had really liked the idea of. As you'll see, mine didn't turn out quite the way I'd pictured, but it works! I also made a knitted math hat. Peruse the pictures below!

Garment Data:
- Type: Hat, scarf
- Date made: Probably summer of 2008?
- Pattern: None. I looked at other hats/scarves in the math shapes I wanted, but then just went from there on my own.
- Fabric/Materials: Acrylic yarn (or maybe an acrylic/wool blend?)
- Trim: none
- Time to finish: I know it took a while! A few weeks, maybe?

The hat and scarf set. They don't look like much, but I promise that they are mathematically cool! And yet warm to wear ;)

Here you can see them together.

The scarf is actually a Mobius strip! In fact, instead of knitting a strip, putting a twist in, and having a seam, I actually took several tries to put the twist into my first row, so that as I knit, I actually went twice around and added to "both" edges before coming back to the beginning of my row!

Here you can see the twist in the scarf. This means that though it is "two-dimensional" (flat), the twist makes it 3D.

It's ribbed, 5 rows each of knit and then purl. Unfortunately this means it curls up into a narrow strand.

I tend to wear it looped 3 times around my neck.

The hat, though, is even cooler. It is a Klein bottle, which is a tube that connects to itself - but not at the ends, to make a donut ("torus"). Nope, it goes through itself!!

Here, from the outside, you can see the outer surface narrow and go in to meet the inner surface.

Here's a close-up of where the outside goes in. Instead of going through its own surface like a proper Klein bottle (explained below), since knitting is a "porous" surface, I had the small end of the tube go through a stretched hole. Then, from the other side, I widened the tube by knitting expansions into it, so that it could meet the inside tube.

Here you can see the inside of the hat, where the outside comes through and joins (you can see the seam about 3 inches down from the crown). Because of the way a Klein bottle works, the hat is actually two layers. You can also kind of see that the top of the hat was knitted on smaller gauge needles. I go back and forth on whether that was a good decision or not - it made it harder to work, and also made it less "loopy" and thus less obviously a Klein bottle.

 This video has a pretty good visual explanation of what my hat does:

Video credit to bothmer for the excellent visual explanation of how a Klein Bottle is basically a 3D Mobius strip.

As to how it compares to my hat, the curly bottom part in the video is the top of my hat. And doubled over, almost donut-like top in the video is the two-layer part of the hat that goes on my head!

Here you can see the ribbed brim I added to the part of the shape that I decided would be the best "hat" part (the top of the shape in the video). This made the shape into a true hat, since now you can see which part to put on your head!

 Most sincerely yours,
~ Sarah