Doris Chan - Convertible Crochet: Customizable Designs for Stylish Garments

Theres little doubt that I was a born skeptic. My first word was probably Why? followed closely by Why not? and must have been in Cantonese, the only language my parents had in common when they married and the one we used at home until I was five. Very quickly the Doris chatter was punctuated with English words and songs I absorbed while mesmerized by television.

My parents must have been relieved to pack their little skeptic off to school every day, if only to provide them a respite from the incessant stream of questions. Mom and Dad did not have much education, at least not by American school standards, so by the time I finished second grade I had gone beyond being able to get answers at home regarding very important stuff about life, the universe, and everything. My parents steered me toward books. At least I was quiet while reading.

Textbooks contained answers but were so boring. I naturally gravitated toward fiction, especially stories about horses and animals. But one series of childrens books that imagined an animal in space, Ruthven Todds Space Cat , plunged me into my lifelong romance with science fiction. In that era, the genre was filled with ray guns and hypertestosterone action, appealing more to boys. It wasnt until A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine LEngle that I found a relatable sci-fi story with a girl as the central character. Granted, Meg Murry was a geeky oddball, but then so was I.

Another influential book was Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions , the novella by Edwin A. Abbott first published in 1884. On one level Flatland is a satiric commentary on the rigid social structure in Victorian England; on another level it takes you on a mind-bending trip to a world with only two dimensions, where men are polygons and women are straight lines, to a closed society where it is heretical, even illegal, for inhabitants to discuss the existence of a third dimension. So what happens when an observer, a sphere from a three-dimensional parallel world, arrives? Imagine how we would react to an extra-dimensional visitor. It wasnt exactly a fun read, but it caused me to view geometry in a totally different light. Way before muggles, there were Flatlanders.

Although I possessed neither the aptitude nor the discipline to go on to study serious science, which demands rigorous proofs grounded in hard-core mathematics, I have always been drawn to the wonder, mystery, and majesty of the great cosmological ideas that are hinted at in my beloved science fiction. Pop science works such as Carl Sagans Cosmos were eye-opening. Is everything connected? Are we truly made of star stuff, the elements created during the death throes of massive stars in the last infinitesimal fraction of a second before they explode into supernovae? Can it be that space-time is a fabric that folds, bends, and curves and is therefore possible to warp, as in warp drive? All the stuff of science fiction, multiple dimensions, parallel universes, black holes, wormholes, antimatter. For real? Such thoughts not only fueled my imagination, but reinforced the need to question everything, for no great ideas arise unless you look outside the box. In a way, its the skeptical part of my nature coupled with the romance of science and science fiction that led me to design crochet the way I do and to develop the garments for this book.