The Thigh Bone's Connected To The Hip Bone

I'm waiting for some yarn to come...a lot of it. In fact, until I find a storefront that's suitable, pretty much all I've been doing is researching and tracking down beautiful and eclectic fibers with which to stock the store, using only my old yarn stash to satiate my winding cravings for the time being, since hey--now that I make my own yarn, when am I ever going to need to dip into that again??

However, now that the big show is over I set out to do what I've been putting off for weeks: trying to find out how to make the auto-shutoff work on the machine. It's designed so that if, while winding multiple fibers, one of them breaks, it will automatically trigger the shut-off. This is important because with so many ends winding at such a high speed, it's easy to miss one of these breakages visually, and you could end up winding an entire cone without realizing that one of the strands broke halfway through.

So for some reason this hasn't been working for me, and Dave and I had concluded that the weights I currently had on the arms, the ones that make this

heavy enough to hit this

which will push this

up far enough to catch on the wheel and stop the winding, weren't heavy enough.

So he sent me these in the mail:

Mammoth in comparison to the little guys I had on there to start with, and the afternon was spent adding, adjusting, and testing, and now it works! Unnoticed breakage no more.

Oh, the other thing I've been working on is knitting a sign for the store. Yep, that's right, knitting it. It's actually not as outlandish as it sounds: knitting is the only avenue where I actually hold any artistic talent, so if ever I am tasked with creating something, it will--by default--be knitted. Nevertheless, it's going to be awesome. Stay tuned.

Lindsey's Constant

So now that Urban Craft Uprising is over, it's all systems go for the store. I'm in full search mode for a storefront, and the sooner the better. All I want to do all day long is make yarn, so all the better if it's on a bustling pedestrian thoroughfare where you all can come join me, rather than in my garage in my down vest listening to my MP3 player.

But despite the apparent dearth of retail space less than 1,000 square feet, my mind is in full planning mode. For example, the other day on the bus, this occurred to me: what if I have a customer who comes into the store with a pattern, and wants to make a cone of yarn that will mimic the yarn called for in the pattern? As a make-it-up-as-you-go-along knitter, I've always bought the yarn first and chosen the projects later, adjusting the pattern to fit my gauge if needed. But I know some out there are die-hard pattern followers, so there's got to be a way to deal with this if it comes up.

And, I realized, there is:

When I make yarn, it's by the pound. Whether it's one strand of 16/2 cotton or six strands of 3/9 wool, it's by the pound. But knitting patterns usually call for their yarn in 100-gram skeins (usually stating how many meters each skein of that brand and type will yield). So I need to be able to--quickly and routinely--convert meters/gram into yards/pound (ypp), as that is standard by which all my input yarn is measured.

So, treasured skills from my year as a math tutor surface, and I begin scribbling unit conversions onto the back of the only paper I had on me, the brown paper bag I had used to carry bread to the potluck I was coming from (click to enlarge):

So what did I come up with?

496.05

That's the number you would multiply your meters per gram by in order to get yards per pound. So now we'd know how thick we wanted this yarn to be--all you'd have to do next is choose your fiber and color, and you're good to go!

Am I the first person to think of this? Do I get a constant named after me like Euler??