The Mad Person-Who-Stitches: Final Fantasy X Lulu's Trim

Gentle readers, I have once again decided that my aerial partners and I shall dance as characters whose costumes, while representing an apex of sartorial splendor, are vastly unsuited to anything but virtual reality.  My job is to render these clothes to a reality suitable for aerialists.

In this post I deal with the lacey trim on Lulu's sleeves and train:

Ideally, I would do this with lace or embroidered iron-on applique.  However, this lace pattern is not, to my knowledge, made commercially, and I do not make my own lace.  I prioritized the pattern over the material, and chose to do the trim with fabric paint.  I used Tulip dimensional slick paint: it does dry flexible, as advertised, and it won't be entirely flat, but I can easily control the thickness.  

Step 1: make the pattern with pencil and paper.  Take the time to make sure you are happy with what you have, because after this it will be all tracing what you've made.  Lulu's trim is all two-part mirror image, so only draw half and then flip and trace the reverse for the second half.

Step 2: ink your pattern.  Sharpie markers are best, as you want the pattern to bleed through the paper for purposes of flipping and tracing the mirror image, as mentioned above. 

 Step 3: use temporary fabric marker to trace the pattern onto your fabric.  This is dark fabric, so I had to improvise a crude lightbox to be able to see the pattern through the fabric.

 

Step 4: fabric paint!  Get a bottle with a narrow tip to avoid the aggravation of brushes.  Make sure you have waxed paper or waxed cardboard under your fabric.  Work from top to bottom and from your non-dominant hand side to your dominant hand side to lower your chance of smudging your work.  Below is one sleeve:

I got both sleeves done today.  It took about 1.5 hours per sleeve, not counting making the patterns, which I did yesterday.  The (divided by necessity) skirt portions still needed some finishing before I applied paint; I'll do those later this week.  

 While scowling at my various image files of Lulu and sketching my patterns, I wondered about the possibility of writing a program that could take an image file of something like Lulu's trim, folded and curved as it appears on clothing, and apply transformations to turn the relevant portions into a linear strip with the correct proportions, magically increase resolution from frequently blurry screenshots, and print out a pattern.  My guess is that the first part is possible.  The second part, not so much: obtaining good resolution stills of the parts of the costume I need to study has always been a problem for my cosplay work.  

Say Yes to the Dress: Murderous Queen

This is the dress worn by Gertrude in the 1996 film adaptation of Hamlet. It is currently on display in the Biltmore House, as part of the Fashionable Romance exhibit. If I were going to aid and abet in the murder of my husband, combine the funeral with the wedding of my new husband, and then try to get my son assassinated, I would absolutely wear this.

What do you think, dear readers?  Is this just the thing for a queen needing to change husbands, or is it too purple?

Caturday Post: Tamerlane Levels Up

the top level of the new cat tower

Friday Fabulosity: Gravitational Ripples

From 5:45 - 6:00, watch two of Saturn's shepherd moons herd ring particles:

If you watch the ring, not the moons, you can see the "ripple" in the ring as the moons pass.

If you love space, this entire Crash Course Astronomy video series is well worth watching.  It's free on youtube, with the inimitable Phil Plait of the always interesting and informative Bad Astronomy blog as narrator.  

Babylonian Algebra and an Uzbekistanian Tangent

Everyday Life in Babylonia and Assyria, by H.W.F. Saggs, is probably rather outdated at this point.  However, I found it an interesting and very readable overview.  And it has a math problem.  An actual Babylonian math problem, with solution, from a clay tablet.  The problem goes as follows:

I have added the surface of my two squares: 28;20.[The text uses sexagesimal numbers.  In our usual decimal system, \(28;20 = 20\cdot 1 + 28 \cdot 60 = 1700\).]
(The side of) one square is a quarter (the side of) the (other) square.
You put down 4 and 1.
You multiply 4 by 4: 16.
You multiply 1 by 1: 1.
You add 1 and 16: 17.
The reciprocal of 17 cannot be solved.
What must I put to 17 [i.e. What must I multiply 17 by] which will give me 28;20 [1700]? 1;40 [100].
This is the square of 10.
You raise 10 by 4 and 40 is (the side of) one square.
You raise 10 by I and 10 is (the side of) the second square.

A modern symbolic solution: Let x and y be the side lengths of the squares.  We know that

\[x^2 + y^2 = 1700 \] and (without loss of generality assume \(y < x\) ) \[ x = 4y \]

Substitute \(x = 4y\) into \(x^2 + y^2 = 1700\) and get
\begin{eqnarray*}
 16y^2 + y^2 & =& 1700 \\
17y^2 &=& 1700\\
y^2 &=& 100\\
y &=& \pm 10
\end{eqnarray*}

Since the problem is talking about physical squares, we discard the negative solution and get \(y = 10\), \(x=4y=40\).

You can find problems exactly like this in any present day basic algebra textbook, right down to the use of nice integers which tempt natural arithmeticians to not show their work and thus receive only partial credit on graded homework and tests. 

My number theory textbook says that the mathematician whose book Kitab al-jabr introduced Europe to algebra, Abu Ja'far Mohammed Ibn Musa Al-Khwarizmi, was from the town of Khiva (Kowarzizm) in modern day Uzbekistan.  I tried to do a short research report on Khiva my first year of college, and could (at the time) put my hands on almost zero substantive material.  The most anyone could seem to say about the town was that it (a) wasn't quite as notorious a slave-trading center as its neighbor town, Merv, and (b) has a lovely, though relatively recent, half-finished minaret:

image from Wikipedia

Caturday Post: Scaramouche Is A Measurable Set*

But he might chew on the measuring instrument.

*That is, we can apply to him a non-negative real function m such that
   1) m(empty set) = 0
   2) for any finite or countable collection of pairwise disjoint sets A_n in Scaramouche with the union of the A_n's = A also in Scaramouche, the sum over n of the m(A_n) = m(A). (i.e., measuring all the little pieces and adding is the same as adding all the little pieces and then measuring, since we are assuming that none of the pieces overlap: that's the pairwise disjoint bit). 

For further reading on measures, Wolfram Mathworld is always helpful.  

History Tidbit: The Language of the Law

While reading at Matthew Ferguson's blog I came across the following thought-provoking detail quoted from W.E.H. Cockle.  In State Archives in Graeco-Roman Egypt from 30 BC to the Reign of Septimius Severus, Cockle says

“In legal contracts or documents the language of the contract determined the law which would apply. In case of disagreement a Greek contract was judged by Greek law, an Egyptian Demotic contract by Egyptian native law, and a Latin contract by Roman law.”

 I must now see if I can get JPASS register and read to work for me so I can read Cockle's whole article.  I dearly miss having university access to JSTOR.