Recently, the Husband and I were out with a colleague/friend, and Willa Cather came up. (As she does. At least when you hang out with librarians.) I mentioned that I hadn't read any of her books since high school, when Academic Decathlon kind of ruined My Antonia for me. I started to move on conversationally, when the Husband noticed her confusion.
"I think you've got to explain Academic Decathlon."
At first I tried to compare it to Quiz Bowl, which my high school didn't have, but which my younger brother competed in at a different school after my family moved and which seems to be more common. "It's a little like Quiz Bowl," I said. "But the questions are more in-depth. Or at least I think that's the difference. Or like Science Olympiad, but without science. Well, I don't think there was science. I'm sorry, it's been a while."
Since she was still confused, I went on, but her lack of understanding combined with my fuzzy memory was making me question the details. "You studied things? And then you took a test? But, like, in front of people. As a competition."
I guess I had never had to explain it that far before. I'm pretty sure that up to that point, anyone I had mentioned it around had heard of Academic Decathlon, or Quiz Bowl, or Spell Bowl, or Science Olympiad. You know, competitive academics.
Competitive academics was what I did in high school. I was uncoordinated and slow, so sports were out. I wasn't artistic, or at least I didn't think I was, so art was out. I was shy and awkward, so drama and debate team were out. I was kind of scared of the soup kitchen, so Key Club was out. I needed to get some form of scholarship in order to go away for school, so not doing anything was out. Competitive academics it was!
People who also did Academic Decathlon, feel free to jump in on the comments if I get details wrong. (There have to be some of you out there, right? Maybe you came here looking for brethren. Hello! Come in! I bow to the nerd within you!) Basically, as a team, you got a book that was your subject guide. You studied those subjects, along with supplementary texts. Then you gathered with other schools' teams on a certain prearranged day and took a test. I think part of it was multiple choice and part required writing. There was also a speech portion.
Academic Decathlon was my biggest "sport", but I also did Spell Bowl (basically a written spelling bee) and Science Olympiad. (Focused - duh - on science and engineering, it required moving around and enthusiasm for science, so I didn't stick with it long). I promise you that I am not joking when I say that I lettered in Academics. Like, I could have gotten a letter jacket, and put my Academics Letter on it. That was not a thing I chose to do, but the option was there.
Preparing for these competitions wasn't fun, exactly, but I had friends there. Friends who I genuinely liked, with off-beat senses of humor and decent taste in pop culture. One of my fonder high school memories is meeting up with them after we won regionals and nearly getting kicked out of the theater for mocking Patch Adams. (Nerds can rebel too!)
Mock me all you want. God knows the Husband does. But at least my friends and I maintained a certain ironic distance from the whole thing. We were in a small public school in a city in Indiana's industrial corner, near Lake Michigan. Because of our school's small size and the statewide trend towards large consolidated public school districts, we were competing mostly against private schools, especially once we made it through regionals to the state competition.
And those schools took competitive academics seriously. They had Academic Decathlon classes. They brought (male) friends who painted things on their chests and took off their shirts during the mostly very quiet competitions. They asked my teammates whether we were in gangs. (Our city did have some issues with gangs, but oddly, they didn't seem to do much recruiting at the Academic Decathlon practices.) In short, we were on the fringe of a group that was already on the fringes of high school life.
I have no Academic Decathlon regrets. I don't think about it often, but when I do, I am happy. I was lucky to find people with similar senses of humor who started to help me feel comfortable in my own skin, and to do it before college. Perhaps the only thing I regret is having to explain what the hell competitive academics is. And the fact that I still can't face My Antonia.
Thursday, February 20, 2014
Thursday, February 6, 2014
For Those About To Weave
WARNING: This post is focused on my rigid heddle loom. If you don't care about rigid heddle looms, you may find this post boring. Maybe you should look at something else. Personally, I'm a fan of Radiolab's tumblr. I promise to talk about something else next time
I've talked before about my stat counter and how much I love seeing what brings people who don't know me here. Before it was naughty vegetables that brought strangers to my corner of the internet. These days it's the post about my Spears Loom.
I know from experience that weaving info is harder to come by than knitting info, and that details about the nitty-gritty of choosing a rigid heddle are even harder. Since writing the above-mentioned post, I graduated to a 19" Glimakra Emilia. I mostly like it, and I'm going to say why. First, though, a quick word about the Spears loom.
If you find yourself with a Spears loom, or a similar loom that is/was marketed as a toy, I think the trick to getting good results is to remember that it is still a loom. I ran into trouble when I was measuring my warp threads. Rather than setting up a makeshift warping board, I measured the warp threads by hand with a yard stick. This was not only way more of a pain than doing it right would have been, but since wool is stretchy, it meant my warp threads were all slightly different lengths, which is part of why so many of them broke mid-project.
(On a side note, the instruction manual for the Spears loom was what led me astray. It also contained a racial slur, in reference to a brown color in one of the sample projects. Again, it's from the early 60s, but still. Really altogether terrible and unhelpful.)
Anyway, on to the Glimakra. First, quick details. I bought mine online from Paradise Fibers. It was a great experience. When I bought it, I had woven on a floor loom and on the Spears. After much waffling, I finally went with the Glimakra because I liked the look of it. This post features a couple of the projects I've finished on it most recently - the scarf with a single heddle and the towels with two. After three years of use (but with no experience on other rigid heddle looms), here's what I think.
The good:
More wood and metal than plastic. On a lot of rigid heddle looms, the ratchets that let you tighten the warp are plastic. On the Glimakra Emilia, they are metal. In fact, pretty much anything on this loom that is plastic (the heddles, for example) has to be plastic.
Easy to use second heddle. Being able to add a second heddle means that you can use finer yarns and make thinner fabrics. This was important to me.
Can handle long warps. Some looms have beams across the back (for stability, I suppose) that limit how long your warp can be. (A long warp is going to have to wrap around the back end of the loom more times, and thus be thicker.) Glimakra does a beam there, but it is far enough forward that it doesn't seem to affect the possible length of your warp.
Good weaving experience. I have to be honest: I don't have a ton of experience weaving on other rigid heddles. But one thing I was worried about was that the experience of weaving on one wouldn't be as fun as weaving on a floor loom. It's a fact that I still think I'll buy a floor loom one day. There are drafts (weaving patterns) you just can't do on a rigid heddle, even with two heddles. But until that point, any complaints about weaving that I've had have been corrected when I checked the tightness of my warp.
Folds. I'm not going to lie; even when folded, it takes up a pretty good amount of space. But when I had to move out of my studio, it was nice to be able to fold it up (with the project in the picture still on it!) to make it slightly easier to move.
Nice and wide. I love the 19" width. Much wider, and I think I'd have difficulty beating evenly. Much narrower and I would feel constrained.
Now the less good:
The stand. Oh my gosh, is this stand terrible to set up. The loom screws into it (rather than resting on it), and the stand isn't able to stay upright on its own until the loom is screwed in. The instructions for the stand tell you that it is best to put the loom on the stand with a helper, and they aren't lying. This, in my opinion, is a serious flaw.
Taking the loom on and off the stand while a project is on it is a risky business, a fact I learned when I had to move out of my studio before finishing the towels pictured above. When I watched the KnitPicks tutorial on weaving and saw how easily the Kromski Harp comes off and on its stand, I felt a bit weepy. (The Kromski also functions as a warping board, which is neat. But I personally don't like how the heddles sit upright rather than hanging.)
The stand is also not as sturdy as I would like. There was an ordeal with tightening the carriage bolts that attach the loom to the stand (in an effort to make it less wobbly) that I'd rather not relive. (Don't let your spouse/significant other hammer your loom! Even if s/he is very careful, if there is loom damage, it will cause marital strain. The loom and our marriage are fine, but it was touch and go for a few moments.)
Actually, that's really it for out-and-out drawbacks. It's a doozy, though - enough so that I have seriously considered getting a different loom.
What say you, though? If you care enough about rigid heddle looms to have read this far, I'd love to hear what you think. Have you tried out others? Are any of my complaints or compliments just a result of my limited experience? Which ones are you thinking about buying?
I've talked before about my stat counter and how much I love seeing what brings people who don't know me here. Before it was naughty vegetables that brought strangers to my corner of the internet. These days it's the post about my Spears Loom.
I know from experience that weaving info is harder to come by than knitting info, and that details about the nitty-gritty of choosing a rigid heddle are even harder. Since writing the above-mentioned post, I graduated to a 19" Glimakra Emilia. I mostly like it, and I'm going to say why. First, though, a quick word about the Spears loom.
If you find yourself with a Spears loom, or a similar loom that is/was marketed as a toy, I think the trick to getting good results is to remember that it is still a loom. I ran into trouble when I was measuring my warp threads. Rather than setting up a makeshift warping board, I measured the warp threads by hand with a yard stick. This was not only way more of a pain than doing it right would have been, but since wool is stretchy, it meant my warp threads were all slightly different lengths, which is part of why so many of them broke mid-project.
(On a side note, the instruction manual for the Spears loom was what led me astray. It also contained a racial slur, in reference to a brown color in one of the sample projects. Again, it's from the early 60s, but still. Really altogether terrible and unhelpful.)
Anyway, on to the Glimakra. First, quick details. I bought mine online from Paradise Fibers. It was a great experience. When I bought it, I had woven on a floor loom and on the Spears. After much waffling, I finally went with the Glimakra because I liked the look of it. This post features a couple of the projects I've finished on it most recently - the scarf with a single heddle and the towels with two. After three years of use (but with no experience on other rigid heddle looms), here's what I think.
The good:
More wood and metal than plastic. On a lot of rigid heddle looms, the ratchets that let you tighten the warp are plastic. On the Glimakra Emilia, they are metal. In fact, pretty much anything on this loom that is plastic (the heddles, for example) has to be plastic.
Easy to use second heddle. Being able to add a second heddle means that you can use finer yarns and make thinner fabrics. This was important to me.
Can handle long warps. Some looms have beams across the back (for stability, I suppose) that limit how long your warp can be. (A long warp is going to have to wrap around the back end of the loom more times, and thus be thicker.) Glimakra does a beam there, but it is far enough forward that it doesn't seem to affect the possible length of your warp.
Good weaving experience. I have to be honest: I don't have a ton of experience weaving on other rigid heddles. But one thing I was worried about was that the experience of weaving on one wouldn't be as fun as weaving on a floor loom. It's a fact that I still think I'll buy a floor loom one day. There are drafts (weaving patterns) you just can't do on a rigid heddle, even with two heddles. But until that point, any complaints about weaving that I've had have been corrected when I checked the tightness of my warp.
Folds. I'm not going to lie; even when folded, it takes up a pretty good amount of space. But when I had to move out of my studio, it was nice to be able to fold it up (with the project in the picture still on it!) to make it slightly easier to move.
Nice and wide. I love the 19" width. Much wider, and I think I'd have difficulty beating evenly. Much narrower and I would feel constrained.
Now the less good:
The stand. Oh my gosh, is this stand terrible to set up. The loom screws into it (rather than resting on it), and the stand isn't able to stay upright on its own until the loom is screwed in. The instructions for the stand tell you that it is best to put the loom on the stand with a helper, and they aren't lying. This, in my opinion, is a serious flaw.
Taking the loom on and off the stand while a project is on it is a risky business, a fact I learned when I had to move out of my studio before finishing the towels pictured above. When I watched the KnitPicks tutorial on weaving and saw how easily the Kromski Harp comes off and on its stand, I felt a bit weepy. (The Kromski also functions as a warping board, which is neat. But I personally don't like how the heddles sit upright rather than hanging.)
The stand is also not as sturdy as I would like. There was an ordeal with tightening the carriage bolts that attach the loom to the stand (in an effort to make it less wobbly) that I'd rather not relive. (Don't let your spouse/significant other hammer your loom! Even if s/he is very careful, if there is loom damage, it will cause marital strain. The loom and our marriage are fine, but it was touch and go for a few moments.)
Actually, that's really it for out-and-out drawbacks. It's a doozy, though - enough so that I have seriously considered getting a different loom.
What say you, though? If you care enough about rigid heddle looms to have read this far, I'd love to hear what you think. Have you tried out others? Are any of my complaints or compliments just a result of my limited experience? Which ones are you thinking about buying?
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