No, said Aziraphale, it's ineffable.

viscountess

The pattern I’m showing you today is a really straightforward one with darts, but it’ll give you an idea of what I mean by using a dress form to create your patterns. Afterwards it becomes a little easier to extrapolate the concept and start making more specialized bodice patterns, etc.

Supplies:

Dress Form
Muslin
Ruler
French Curve (I’m using my hip curve in the pictures because I can’t find my french curve)
Pins
Pencil
String

Key:

CF = Centerfront
SS = Sideseam

First things first, pin some ribbon across from the apex of one side of the bust to the other, this is going to keep the pattern from dipping down in the center where it shouldn’t.

Second, mark off where you want your neckline, which can be any neckline you want in your finished product. In this case the finished design is going to have a pointed collar that’s fairly snug to the neck so that’s where I marked it off with string (you can use whatever is lying around the house, I use this because it’s thin enough to be easy to shape and round that you can feel for it under the muslin)

Before you cut your muslin, you’re going to take a measuring tape from a little more than an inch past the shoulder line and an inch past the waistline to measure out the length you’re going to need. It’s not important to make this an exact measurement, just make sure you have enough for seam allowance.

Your length grain (parallel to the selvedge like in the pic) is going to run along up an down the torso of the form. Grainlines get really important when you do more complicated things because you need to know where your stretch is going to be (even in regular fabrics, there is always a little stretch on the bias) so it’s good to get into the habit of working with the right grainlines right off the bat.

Mark off one inch even though CF is always a fold (unless there is a closure or something else decorative).

Start molding it to the form. Fold the one inch back and line it up from the centerfront line on the dressform and start pinning it down (neckline, waist, shoulders, side seams). Our darts are going to be mainly from the bust down, so make sure the shoulder is smooth and just gently pat the excess fabric flat.

Keep reading

ticotimes.net

Scientists figure out why female turtles are born at higher temperatures

Scientists have identified a gene that seems to be responsible for turning hot and cold temperatures into girl and boy baby turtles. The finding could help keep turtles safe in an ever-warming world.

typhlonectes

In the 1980s, scientists trying to save sea turtles noticed something truly bizarre.
They thought they were doing something good: rescuing eggs from vulnerable beaches and keeping them warm in incubators until they were ready to swim out to sea.
But when the sea turtles were born, almost every single one of them was male. At that point, scientists had known for some 80 years that sex was determined by a creature’s chromosomes. It seemed crazy that you could skew a hatchling’s gender just by taking its egg out of the sand — just as crazy as saying that the gender of a baby depended on where its mother lived while she was pregnant.
And yet here were dozens of all-male sea turtle siblings wriggling in front of them, emphatically suggesting that sex wasn’t as straightforward as it seemed.
What those scientists encountered was temperature-dependent sex determination (TSD), a phenomenon found in a range of cold-blooded animals. Unlike mammals, birds and other creatures, whose sex is set by the chromosomes they get from their parents, the trigger that causes turtle embryos to develop into baby boys or girls comes from outside the egg.
Warmer ambient temperatures during incubation will make the hatchlings skew toward female. But keep the eggs just a few degrees cooler — as the scientists in the ’80s inadvertently did — and they’ll come out mostly male…

Amphibian August #02 – Ichthyostega

Living during the Late Devonian of Greenland (~365-360 mya), Ichthyostega is one of the most well-known of all early tetrapods, represented by a large number of fossil specimens and frequently depicted in the media as a “fish with feet” crawling out of the water.

At about 1.5m long (4′11″) it was still mostly aquatic, but with a stronger skeleton and powerful forelimbs to help better support itself on land. It wasn’t capable of quadrupedal walking, but instead would have dragged itself around with “crutching” movements similar to modern mudskippers.

It also had seven toes on its hind limbs (the number on its forelimbs is still unknown for certain), unlike later tetrapods which settled on a default five-digit limb plan.

Amphibian August #03 – Crassigyrinus

Often described as a “giant carnivorous tadpole”, Crassigyrinus lived during the Early Carboniferous of Scotland (~345-328 mya), with a possible specimen also found in West Virginia. It’s one of the few early tetrapods known from “Romer’s Gap”, a period of time during the group’s evolution which is frustratingly lacking in fossils.

Crassigyrinus showed the earliest known example of five-digit pentadactyl limbs, a characteristic ancestral to all living tetrapods. Its forelimbs were proportionally tiny compared to its 2m long body (6′6″), and its pelvis lacked a solid connection to its spine, suggesting it was actually an entirely aquatic animal – possibly representing the first group of tetrapods who gave up on the whole “land” business and returned full-time to the water.

Distinctive surface ornamentation on parts of its skull have also led to some speculation that it might have had weed-mimicking skin fringes, similar to modern matamata turtles and wobbegongs.