Blog Posts – Page 2 – Helen Loves Science Knitting

A stupendous fail 🤷‍♀️

I thought it would be helpful to post about projects I undertake that fail, or those that take a lot of iterations to get to the final product. Below is the pile of earlier versions of the crochet fatty acids from the membrane granny square. It took dozens of attempts to work out a pattern for this piece:

Left: unused earlier pieces of the granny square membrane. Right: final piece.

This week I uploaded a piece of work to the Twitter SciArt Community group as part of SciArtSeptember activity for scientific illustrators to share their work. The work shared by members of this amazingly talented group is phenomenal. And then there’s my contribution….

This piece was rushed, designed and completed in a couple of hours (whilst the kids were still on school hols, so with Roblox and The Simpsons in the background). The prompt for day 1 was the word “Survivor” which immediately made me think of my favourite microbe Deinococcus radiodurans. This bacterium has an amazing ability to withstand radiation and repair itself following exposure, making it a microbe of significant interest in both the biotech and health industries (click here for link to a Nature Micro Reviews article on this bacterium). Hence, I couldn’t resist having a go at making something! Here is the end result (this picture here shows what I was aiming for):

Crochet representation of Deinococcus radiodurans as four neon coloured circles joined together in a tetrad — Final piece – a tetrad of Deinococcus radiodurans cells

Needless to say this was not how I imagined the final piece was going to look. I don’t regret submitting it, it was very different from the other pieces uploaded for that day which perhaps shows a different perspective on the topic. And whilst making the piece, I came up with loads of new ideas for future pieces of work, which I guess was one of the goals of the exercise? So, in some ways it was a success 😜.

PS My 10 year old thinks it looks like butt cheeks….

Crochet Granny Square Bacterial Cell Membrane

It’s been a while, and I’ve been struggling with serious mental health issues, so apologies for the lack of posts. I’m starting back with an easy post to document the last progress on the bacterial cell membrane!

Gram staining is about the least sexy of all microbial lab experiments, but its my go-to favourite. Lots of visuals, colour and instant results. It’s still the first place I start when identifying unknown bacteria. And I have carried out thousands of them 😫, so it seemed like a good idea for my next science crochet project. I wanted something 3D and tactile rather than the flat images you usually see in text books. So here we have the Granny Square Bacterial Cell Membrane:

Originally the fatty acids were crocheted with 100 % acrylic yarn, but there was too much curling in the final product, so I swapped to cotton yarn which has less curl and a stiffer texture:

Crocheted in 100 % cotton yarn:

Crochet Granny square depicting a cell membrane

And finally, a new addition to the project, some peptidoglycan layering in two colour popcorn stitch!:

Will it be Gram positive or Gram negative 🤔?

I will update with fully labelled images when I’m back at work in mid-August!

Minecraft and me…

Tell me the story behind your tattoo Helen, said no one ever… but here we are (its mostly pictures 😀 )…

I started playing Minecraft in the summer of 2014 during a really difficult period in my life. My beautiful daughter Emma was born in May that year. However, shortly afterwards I developed pretty bad postnatal depression, and struggled to leave the house for a period of time. Every afternoon during Emma’s 1-3 pm post-feed nap, I would play Minecraft on the Xbox, with her sleeping on my knee. See here, its the perfect position:

And this is when the beauty of Minecraft was brought into my life. The soundtrack, gameplay, characters, beautiful scenery, adventure, all helped restore my mental health that summer. Here’s my favourite song from the soundtrack, Haggstrom (still makes me cry):

So the tattoo? In 2020, I designed and knitted a fair isle hat for Emma, based on some of my favourite Minecraft flora. The process of getting from in-game images of the Minecraft flowers (Dandelion, Rose, Cornflower and Pink Tulip) to a complete knitted hat is shown below.

Top & bottom left: final knitted hat; centre: freshly inked tattoo; top & bottom right: images from the Stitchart app

I used the android app Stitchart (built by Caron & Jason Morris) to build prototype designs of the pattern (shown above). The amazing Chez (https://www.instagram.com/chezneychalks.tattoo/) used these images to design and ink the tattoo for me. All healed today and it looks amazing ♥.

Biology Week 2016 – Knitting Bomb

Thought I would add some context to this post 😁. In 2016 I organised a biology themed knitting bomb with a group of staff and students at Teesside Uni. The event took place during the Society of Biology “Biology Week 2016”. We had lots of amazing contributions – some pictures below … warning this was prior to my social media days so these are proper old school and not glamorous!! The fab Helen Hodgson (Senior Technician Analytical Chemistry) knitted the brain – my favourite piece.

Some of these pieces are from published patterns as follows:

Blue Tit, Caterpillar and Shell were from the amazing book “75 Birds, Butterflies & Beautiful Beasties to Knit & Crochet” by Lesley Stanfield

Chromosomes, DNA, Agarose Gel are my own designs.