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I heart Haeckel

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More textures than you ever wanted to know existed. Read more about him, or cut to the chase and see his work at the Wikimedia Commons.

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Lessons from crocheting alcohol dehydrogenase

The difficulty of folding up tertiary structure does NOT scale linearly with amino acid length. One monomer of alcohol dehydrogenase is 374 amino acids long. That's only about 3x as long as lysozyme , but I nearly lost my mind. Bobby pins are essential for the folding process. Use them to keep beta sheets flat as you fold, and also to space helices apart from one another. Hang the structure as you fold it. Especially important early in the process. Chainbows are wonderful :) I'm planning on writing up full instructions of this process, and maybe even making a tutorial video (my first!) Stay tuned.

How to crochet DNA (with proper chirality)

From left to right: crocheting RIGHT handed; crocheting LEFT handed, and crocheting BACKWARDS RIGHT handed. I've been interested in finding ways to represent biological molecules at something representing an accurate scale. To that end, I though it would be awesome to have a standard way of making a double helix of DNA. I tried a bunch of different stitch heights and increase ratios, and it turns out that something very simple works pretty well! 1. Make a chain of length = # desired base pairs/2 2. Chain 1 3. In 2nd chain from hook, make two single crochets in top loop. Repeat for each chain stitch. 4. At end, chain 1, slip in same stitch, chain 1. 4. Turn work 5. Beginning with the last-worked stitch in the base chain, make two single crochets in bottom loop of the base chain. Repeat for the remainder of the work. This yields a helix with about 10-11 base pairs per turn - there's even a major and minor groove! One problem, though - if you do this RIGHT HANDED, ...

A scheme for crocheting fronds, ferns, seaweed, etc

A few people have asked me for patterns for these types of structures. I think it is much easier to just explain the gist of how to freeform it, rather than give an explicit pattern, so here is my attempt. Simply begin with a chain, which, at some point, you'll begin single crocheting back into. This will form the point of the leftmost branch. When the sub branch is as long as you would like (three stitches for the first small branch in the diagram above) chain again to start a second sub branch. Single crochet back onto these new chains to complete the sub branch. You can then continue to single crochet along the "stem" of the branch to finish it off, and chain again once you are back to where you'd like the main "stem" to be. (A "stem" is made from chains that remain without single crochets while you start working another chain.) Repeat as desired, and then begin single crocheting back along the stem instead of chaining again when you've fini...

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