Category: Blog

The Web log of Heather Classen

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Tori’s Toastie Airlock Socks

Keeping your feet toaster warm while you’re airlocking your colleagues.

The beginning of my first project for the BSG FPB game at ravelry.com.

I’m using the colorway starting from both ends. To do this I wound the yarn, finding two repetitions of the colorway and winding into 2 balls of yarn. And then turning each of those balls of yarn into two more, starting at end, and starting at the beginning, to make the color stripes go up and down the sock.

Knitting in the round, for the FTL challenge. First time I’ve used Noro.

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Nerd Fun and Tea 101

Wednesday, 27 May 2009 15:17

as posted on Nerdabout.com

Nerd Fun and Tea 101

May 26, 2009

Back in March, Boston blogger-at-large Heather showed us all that was happening in the Beantown nerd scene. Now she’s back with a report on enjoying a cuppa in the land of the Boston Tea Party.

By Heather Classen

Since the last time I checked in with Nerdabout my meetup group, Nerd Fun Boston, has been nerding all about Beantown. The Cambridge Science Festival brought us countless events, Galileo’s 400th anniversary brought us more, and there’s the regular local events like Maple Sugaring, WGBH talks, the Museum of Science, and all that MIT and Harvard have to offer the community. All quintessential nerd fun.

A couple Saturdays ago we did something a bit different. Assistant organizer, Amy, brought us to afternoon tea at the Park Plaza hotel where tea sommelier Cynthia Gold hosted a tea tasting, teaching us all about the world of fine tea. Instead of ordering off of the tea menu Cynthia brought us five different teas along with scones and tea sandwiches and a tea infused port … so good. The first tea was “Steep Towards a Cure”, a lovely mix of white tea, green tea, and cherry blossoms, mixed especially to support breast cancer research, this is the only of the teas we had that were for sale, and $5 of the $15.50 price is donated to Avon Foundation Breast Cancer Research. She explained how she plans a mix of tea, looking for a dominant flavor, and then complimentary flavors. Then the mix needs to sit for 3 to 7 days for the flavors to blend, but not longer so the tea remains fresh. This particular mix was inspired by the anti-oxidant qualities of the ingredients.

Next up was the World Tea Expo award winning St James Ceylon tea, my favorite, followed by Aria Estate Darjeeling, followed again by an 18 year old Chinese Pu-erh from Yunnan province, ending with a Bohean tea from Anwi province in China.

Cynthia explained the tea harvesting process, and how the fine tea is hand picked to get the best leaves. We learned that the same estates that produce the mass market machine harvested tea also produce this fine handpicked tea. And, that over the next twenty years the world of fine tea will most likely become very expensive as fewer and fewer people are interested in doing the skilled harvesting work. The estates had set up a system where they provided education for the children of the tea pickers, and subsequently with education the children rarely want to follow their parents into the family business.

We also learned about the origin of black tea. White and green tea sent in ships from South Asia to Europe would go bad by the time it arrived in port. The estates learned to dry and ferment the tea before packing it onto the ships bound for England, and even now black tea is still the most widely used in England and the United States.

The Bohean tea that she served with dessert is the same type of high end tea that was thrown into Boston Harborin 1773. The fermentation on this and the Pu-erh tea were definitely noticable. An aquired taste, but fantastic to try.We asked if tea were grown in the U.S., and she mentioned American Classic that was grown in South Carolina, as well as some tea being grown in Hawaii that seemed promising. Tea needs varied climate with dry and wet cycles, good draining and high elevation that steep hills provide, Cynthia explained.

Thanks, Cynthia!

Check the Boston Park Plaza web site to see when they have the next Tea 101.

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Nerdabout Story

from the Nerdabout website:

Boston Nerds Sound Off!

March 02, 2009

Heather Classen recently wrote us about the geek scene in Boston, and we agreed that the world needed to hear more. So voila! Please welcome our Boston Correspondent Heather Classen.

What’s going on in your city? Write us here and be featured on our site.

Hearing about NerdAbout via Facebook, I saw that Nerdabout covers Austin TX, Portland OR, and NYC … no Boston. what up? Boston is the central nerd hatchery as far as I’m concerned… the nerd “Hub”, if you will. You can’t close your eyes and toss your iPhone without hitting another adventurous knowledge loving brainiac… and here’s how I know.

Looking to meet new people during the summer of 2007 I started wading into the Meetup waters, going to lunches, walks, and whatnot. Met great people and had a nice time, but the existing meetup groups weren’t doing the sorts of events I wanted to. There was a Michael Palin book signing in Harvard Square that I wanted to go to and I couldn’t get any of my regular crew to come along. So I took a chance, opened up Nerd Fun Boston, and posted it. No one came. It was just me and my red meetup sign. But, figuring there weren’t many people signed up in my group by the time I ran my first event I gave it another shot. Harvard’s Center for Astrophysics (CfA) has an open house night each month, lecture, telescopes, so I posted it. And they came. There’s been no turning back.

As I write this there’s 1429 membersin my group.My premise for Nerd Fun was to gather life-long learners together. I ran a bunch of events, and then with the help of superstar assistant organizers (i.e. T.J.) the group gathered steam, and people. Each event we attended recruited more and more members. We even started recruiting people who run the events that we attend. NerdFun Boston is a fantastic group of people from all walks of life. Younger people, older people, single, married, straight, gay, local, visiting, foreign, history geeks, science geeks, astronomy geeks, art geeks, geek geeks, everyone. It’s fantastic.

Things that surprised me about the group:

1. history nerds.
I had no idea there were so many history nerds, I thought everyone would be all about semiconductors and bio-pharm in line with Boston’s biggest industries. Our most prolific organizer, T.J. , started attending Boston By Foot Walking Tours and like the pied piper of nerds, T.J. collected a gaggle of history geeks, including the Boston by Foot tourguides themselves. But, I realized, it’s inevitable in a city with Boston’s past that curious people are going to want to spend time learning the history that’s all around us here. Automatic.

2. transient nerds.
We’re getting lots of members who are here in Boston/Cambridge temporarily, for school and work. It’s perfect for them to attach onto a good group of active curious people and see and learn what there is to be seen here. Scientists and lawyers from Europe as visiting Harvard and MIT students, business travellers from Montreal in town for the weekend, students testing the grad school waters before they commit, again, I’m always surprised by who finds us.

3. my nerds are hooking up.
(Myself included.) Having this completely low pressure way of meeting other local brainiacs has really made dating easy. It’s like being back in college without all the classwork and tuition. Many of us are working stiffs that, until now, hadn’t had that “birds of a feather” feeling of community since our university days.

Photo of EventsOur Events:
My favorite recurring event is the monthly Smithsonian Observatory Public Viewing Night, which involves an always interesting lecture followed by stargazing through the telescopes on their Cambridge rooftop. The CfA also has the occassional movie night (i.e. Destination Moon—see below.)

Photo of EventsPhoto by Aram Comjean

We attend talks and exhibits at the Harvard Museum of Natural History , the Museum of Science , the Museum of Fine Arts, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Northeastern University Marine Science Center, the Boston Public Library ,MIT Museum, Boston Duck Tours, movies like Coolidge Corner’s Science on Screen series, John Quincy Adams home, cemetery tours, Paul Revere House, the Old South Meeting House and other Freedom Trail locales. The Longfellow House, Lexington and Concord’s historical sites, Science in the News Seminar Series from Harvard’s Medical School . yada yada yada. The list of events is endless. And our memberlist grows constantly as word gets out.

I’m thrilled at the direction this meetup group has taken, I had no idea that there would be so many really great, funny, intelligent, kind, good hearted, fun, adventurous people out there looking to do the same sorts of nerd-tastic events that I like doing.

But, then again, this is Boston.

Join:
If you’d like to join, please connect with us at meetup alliance to collect similar groups across the US, please join the fun.

—Heather Classen

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Aunt Patty’s Hat

Found some lovely soft yarn (forgot the name, unfortunately) and made my aunt a hat. She used to crochet me all sorts of things when I was little, so I figured it was time to knit her something. Oranges and reds are her colors, and the colorway was perfect for this type of simple rib stitch hat.

Hat for Aunt Patty
Hat for Aunt Patty
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Trinii’s faux denim duster

Solo by Kim Hargreaves, looks like a lil denim jacket, ‘cept I made it longer so it worked like a duster, and I could add some cables at the bottom. My niece grew out of this so fast, but I really like the blue denim color, so it was all worth it. Also, I learned later that I should have put some ribbon or tape on the inside of the button band to make it lie flat. It really curled back as you can see in the picture. I wish I got a better photo of the modified pattern at the time, but she’s such a cutie that makes up for it.

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Retro-post… to mark when I joined Ravelry

I joined ravelry on September 23, 2007. As I move my blog to wordpress (April 2012) I am looking back at how my knitting work has changed for the better, simply by joining up and sharing ideas and inspiration with all the great ravelers (& now friends).

So if you arrived at this post by searching on the “knitting” keyword look at how crappy the stuff that came before this point was compared to the work that came after.

Before:

Early Knit Hat Scarf 2004
Early Knit Hat Scarf 2004

After:

Vivian Sweater
Vivian Sweater

(like, seriously…)

Thanks Ravelry. Truly.

 

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Knitters Without Cats

I just set up this simple page which will feature knitting work posted on flickr.com, by fellow knitters without cats. Knitters Without Cats.

Anyone without a cat can go to flickr.com and post to the group there, and the images will show at the googlepage. I’ve got a corresponding store at Cafepress as well.

Knitters Without Cats
Knitters Without Cats

Update: April 2012 Tagging your photos “knitterswithoutcats” and “kwoc” on flickr.com and ravelry.com is the way to go. Plus I set up a group on Ravelry for us. We tend not to have too much to talk about as that which unites us is that which we don’t want to mention, so the groups and tags are all about surfing project photos without cats lolling (pun intended) about out them. 😉