List Of Knitting Ideas Using A Loom


welcome back to goodknit kisses. i'm your host kristen and today we're making a simple baby hat and then i will show you afterwe cast that one off... and show you how to do that. i will showyou how to make a decreased crown for the baby hat we're gonna start by making a slipknotin our yarn of choice and i have put this into a cut up straw that's all this is and it's going tohelp me get through

in between the pegs i'm using a 24-pegloom today and these little knobs here, these little red parts are switched out from anotherloom and it's gonna help me do my decrease crown so if you wanna stickaround for the end of this video and see how to do thedecreased crown, instead of a drawstring you are welcome to do that. we're going to start by making a slipknot and we're going to wrap this around ourfinger take that back over the front back and the front again

making our slipknot and this is a this is for a newborn; so i don't want a brim and the reason why no brim is becauseit's harder on their heads and this makes it stretchier nomatter what their size. i'm going to actually put this on mystarter peg iand i'm going to go from the topside and to the starter peg this way and we will work that into our design and this way this knot will fall out

the way we're gonna do it. and you won't have any knots in the beginning of your hat. so we're gonna make an e-wrap. and ifyou've never loomed before, you're going to take your yarn from theback side of the peg you gonna wrap it around like a cursive"e" so we're going in the back-side and allyour work will come through this middle part and then what is seen on this side is called the right side (rs) of the work andthis is the pretty side or the front of your hat. we're gonna wrap around the next peg, go-between

these two pegs, go back around andcontinue if you will start wrapping and having your yarn at thebottom of these pegs here, then you will notice the next timeyou go around it will be easier and you don't have to push these down. and while i'm doing thisactually, from this backside, if you'll notice i just take my finger and i lay this yarn down. i continue helping myself wrap.

so now i've come around again. and this is called casting-on and we're getting all this locked onto our pegs making essentially the first stitch. now goback around again and you don't have to have a yarn guide. i just like to use it when i'm e-wrapping. the e-wrap stitch is a stockinette it's a form a regular knit stitch and itwill curl and that's why you're brim will have acurl on it if you want to not curl you have to usea series of

purls, and i have a video on my sitecalled how to make a purl stitch. the combination the purl actually sends the fabric to the other side and if you use a series over row of knit and a row of purl and then a row of knit, that makes a garter stitch and helps it from actually making a rolled brim. so we're going to continueon. go ahead and knit the bottom loop

over the top. if you do this last one first, that willlock it in. so if you have to set this loom down and continue on it's not going to jump off the pegs. go ahead and knit this one over. now when you first do it may be a littletight. you may want to take that starter one off and then knit this over and then now see your beginning tail? go ahead andpull that slipknot out. and we're gonna work that in on our next row so go ahead and continuealong

knitting over everything this hat size will fit a newborn baby it's supposed to fit three to six monthsbut it depends upon the child generally it fits a newborn. if you have apreemie you may even have to go down to the 12pink flower loom (very small preemie) but the preemie hats need anywhere fromnine to 10 inch that's a head circumference, which the hat circumference is gonna be seven-and-a-half you're going down acouple inches in circumference so the hat stays on; niceand snug. we're

gonna push this down all the way around pushing down our row sometimes i'm tight knitter, so it takes me a moment. we're going to go ahead and e-wrap (ew)this first stitch. and then now that we have this beginning strand back here, and what i want is to have thisbeginning strand, because it's coming out this peg here,its gonna go on to our next peg so i'm going to now grab it and use itat the same time with my working strand

and i'm going to e-wrap around. and on this particularpart only i wanna make tight. because i want to makesure that's not going anywhere so make sure that's tight these two onesare tight and he draws this together so it's more seamless. so continue going around. and once you got a goodamount of pegs going, this little straggler here is just going to lay back and you end up either weaving it intothe back of you're hat or you can actually cut it off at thatpoint. because its locked in. its not going

anywhere but this is your first time ever loom,you'll find that he making hats like this are very easy and they're great fordonating to hospitals but you can start increasing yourknowledge and skills by learning new stitches good ahead and knit all these over. and as youlearn new stitches and develop you'll be able to branch out in lots of other projects. learning how to do hat is essential to learning how to loom knit

but you can do as many complicated or un-complicate things on the loomsas you can do on needles (knitting) be sure and check out goodknitkisses youtube main channel:=page we have a playlist on their for beginner loom knit and it starts off a beginner stitches incasting on in binding of all the different terms and things andworks you all the way up into more comfortable to more techniqueso be sure and check that out and i'll bookmark be website forthat okay so we have gone and done

are cast on roe we done row wine in any rap all you can do is continuegoing around only im pushing these down making another roehirap you continue on into you get to acertain link now that certainly is determined by youand how big you want it for the baby you want now not sure how big they he's gonna be youcould make into regular newborn size or even jump it up into i'm with the three-month would be if youwant a newborn

i had that same 13 a 14 inch and normals head circumference the hatcircles gonna be eleven and a half inches to thirteeninches which works perfectly for this one then you want tohack height to be am five-and-a-half to six inches so we're gonna get are measuring tapefound here and we're going to pull it out until you're at five and half or sixinches and then you want to take your hat here market where the 0 is areyou concerned the top here

and i minister here and say six inches and start wherever your yarn is here and then hold it down and say i have to net until i get tothis point so on this is gonna start growing growinggrowing and is gonna get down here when you have the steam engine helps i'mdown like this you can see if it falls at the two i need two moreinches left in it now this hack can be and the brain canbe rolled up if you wanna make it for baby two forthree to six months you couldn't

make it from six-and-a-half 27 inchesfor the happy i wouldn't go in for them at earls it just looks really really big on a small baby so if you're giving itas a baby you're set because these are really easy to make you could make one that's a five incheslong and then make one that's i'm six and a half inches long into theactually had two hats they can grow as babies grow really quickly socontinue on and i'm gonna show you how to do thedraw string cast-off what you wanna do is continue euros

and then we're gonna pas your video andme back up when you're ready to cast of for buying of and that is how you takeyour work of have the needles are pics whicheverway you wanna call it these are pegs some people call me knowsbecause that's essentially what they are and i'm even at that very same and before we go just wanted to show you i'm netted are of all the way around thebush to the bottom with over-the-top now i'm back before my starter pack andjust make sure that your intake these bottom two strands

that was woven for from your beginning row and polos bottom too over the top okay and then that make sure that thoseare all on their so now that this part is locked and you could go ahead and safely cut themoff and just leave a little body part seeking out that's just fine this is theinside of your hat in this party here this is that outsiderhad so the stitches are gonna look like whatcomes out here

cell again push down euros you gonna do this every time you're finewhich way is more comfortable for you you can hold it whichever way one and just add answer aquestion that gets all the time when you're first startingout you can go either direction the point is you wanna always go in onedirection on that particular project were always go on this direction in one particular project if you'reneeding something in around i'm if there's special directions whereyou have to change directions then do

that by am you're just continue for oneproject in the same amount and you'll seedifferent people and videos going one way or another and it's really a matter what'scomfortable for them because the i had a mini and looks the same ok supply your radio and continuing into your designerdesired link and i'll meet you back

who were back and i have needed aboutfive inches for this hat here for demonstration purposes and you can itbegan to enter your desired length is so i stick my five-inch marker here and bring it down to the bottom in that where they had 0hits down at the bottom of this hat and as well as calling the right side ofthe work this is the finished in a pretty side and inside the backside of an e-wrap is a purl and you'll notice that thestitch looks different; that's the opposite

side and you can learn how to make that; so that is on the front side over here and it'll have a little bumpon it. a "purl" bump. so, this is what this looks like. now, i amusing a "super bulky" #6 a "super bulky" #6 and i can put that down the in the description below on the video [description]. in thedescription for the video but and let's say that these ladders, inbetween, let's say this is too "gappy" for you, and this one is just fine (the example shown) but..

but depending upon what youactually pick for yourself you may want to close that gap. so, oneway to do it is to add a third row of e-wraps and you are going to knit the bottom two over the top or you can knit one overthe top two loops. and so if you do one over two, then that will close thatgap for you. so now we are going to do a drawstring cast-off and essentially what it's going to do is pullthese together and bind it up. so this top partwill close inward and

actually makes a very bulky top. it's going to look bulky like this. if you wanna make a smoother top, we're doing decreasecrown, so stick around after we do the drawstring and i'll put this back on and show you how tomake it more of a smooth decrease. we're going to take our workingstrand. go around the loom and we're gonna cut it. now, we've got our working strand comingfrom this last peg we want to put it in between the lastpeg and the first peg

and take our loop here, take our knitting tool, and put it between this loop hear andscoop up this loose working strand and pull it allthe way through. see? and then now we are gonna do the next thing.you're gonna put the working strand below this next loop and we're gonna pick it up and pull it on through. and when you learn it this way you are learning actually how to do a purl stitch because this is the sameway the "purl" stitch is performed.

you actually pick it up and pull it through and then you would remove this loop offand then put this loop back on and then pull it back taut (firm but not tight). and then that actually creates the purlstitch but as i stated before i've got a nice slow video on how to makethe purl stitch on the loom, so be sure and check that video out in the "beginning loom knitting" playlist we're going to continue going all theway around the loom

you want to pick up all your stitches now;some people cut an extra strand and and then they as thread it through with a tapestry needle. in fact, a lot instructionswill say it that way personally, i don't think you need that. -having to thread different kinds ofyarns don't necessarily go through the needle very well, like this kind of strand doesn't go through the needle very well, andthen you end up having 3 loose ends, 3 cut (frayed) ends, like this to deal with at the end rather than just

this one now because this is a (lion brand) homespun product, it's what we call a chenille. it has one little line. of thread, in between, and then all the extra "roving" type material, this fluffy material, and so the end can become frayed and you may want a knot. put a little knot on it or leave yourself a long enough tail so that when you're done pulling thestrings through...and see how this busted up?.. when you're done pulling the strands through,you're gonna need to make a knot so that it doesn't get too out of control

you're coming to the beginning here i'm going to pull this last one through. and if youdidn't go far enough around the loom it's okay go ahead and take off these off the peg and then it will allow you topull on this strand to get more length here. so, you can actually take these of the loom; and the easy way todo is to take your knitting tool and pop it off like that. you're going to pop all these off the pegs.

and then we're done, we're gonna drawstring and pull this closed, and it seals it up. then you're going to knot it and then weave it through the middlepart. i have a video for weaving that through (finishing a hat) so if you wanna watch that video moreclosely [you can]. i'm gonna go ahead and put these back on here and show you how to do thedecreased bind off. [pause your video to dee decrease or see other video for finishing a hat]. i'm going to tie on this new color here,because i've already run out room, because i was trying todo the drawstring method and this

basically broke on me, and so i'm gonnashow you how to change colors and you can weave them in together, butit can create a bulkiness if you're goingfrom the same color to color; but what if you are changing colors so i'm gonna go ahead and tie this on and get it back to the back of this last peg here and then make another loop around to get this square knot here and i tie it right behind

the peg and so that's gonna fall on theback-side of this stitch or inside the loom; and now i cancontinue on my way and wrapping around. and thatknot is gonna secure it. some people don'tlike knots and there's different methods to tie it on. you just pick the method thatworks best for you i know that the knot isn't gonna goanywhere and on this particular project and it's not going to be seen. sowe're gonna go ahead and e-wrap all the way around in continuein our design but for right now i'm gonna show you howto

do the decreased bind-off and what we're gonna do is markall of our pegs in sections and we're gonna have foursections we got a 24 peg loom here and we're going to have and sections of 6; so marked the first pegas "1" i'm moving this way(to the left) you can go this way, it doesn't really matter, but the first peg is "1"... 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. and then i mark "1" peg for the next section, mark itagain,

do the "1" peg and then i've got another "1"back here and so we have four sections of six. so, we want to take our knittingtool and move our number "2", all of our"evens" (even #s) are going over to the "odds" but we're just going on this first round the evens to the odds 2 to 1; so just the 2s to the 1s. [twos go to the ones-describing the peg numbers in each section] move to the next section and we're gonnado the twos to the ones move over. now when you do move these over,

be sure and just unwind, you're going to go in a clockwise (cw) clockwise (cw) fashion with your pick andunwind this stitch and un-twist this e-wrap here andi'll make it a lot easier for you for moving it over. so continue around and we'll meet backup okay we're back and we've got all thesemoved over. we are going to wrap this next row and whenever you come to a skipped peg youcan skip it and then go ahead and wrap the next one. so, yougot to here and this will have a wrap on it; andwhenever we come back i'll show you how to knit

those off (knit off = work the stitch) okay we're going to knit over and we'vegot three loops on this peg and we are going to lock it in;we're going to take the bottom loops over the top so these bottom two loopsare gonna go over this top loop okay and that's now locked and you cango around the loom now and knitting the bottom loops over the topand locking all those in. finish knitting over and wewill come back and do the next decreased row [pause video]....all right, great job! you have finished the first row of thedecreased crown

we're going to move the 4 peg over to the 3. go ahead and unwind and move it over for the next section and take the 4 over the 3 do this in each section and then you'll see that you have ineach section two empty pegs. go ahead and wrap over just the onesthat have a loop on a peg now we've got all that done and we're gonna knit over;this peg here only has one on it

and this one right hear, which was gonna be a number three; we're gonna knit theseover and if it's to tight, like this one here, gonna knit those separately. doesn'tmatter,you get the same result. okay we're on our last section. we'regoing to take the 6 peg and and move it over to the 5. and seei'm just going in a different direction here so that you don't have to be so governed on which way you go (knitting off i mean) okay so if you notice

you got something on every other peg. sowe've now gone 24-pegs; go ahead and wrap these around, the onesthat have a loop on there, we're going to take 24 pegs and we've gone down to 12pegs. so you have decreased your peg count by half ok now that you've done that, we're gonna goahead and and knit over after this row we're done. we're gonna doa drawstring bind off. and now you have half the amount of pegs that you need to go through the loops! so it makes that part easier.

it does take a little more effort to dothis decreased crown. if you're not ready, just to drawstringand, you know, try this whenever you're ready.if you want to try it on my "granny round" video you can try that because it's the same technique. so we're going to measure all theway around the loom with our working strand, and go ahead andcut off and we're going to going to drawstring this. so we're going to pickup the working strand up through, the bottomof this loop, and you can do it from the

top down, too. just do it the same way the entire wayaround the loom. if you don't, it's not gonna drawstringproperly. i'm coming to my last peg here. go ahead and pull it on through and if you find that you're too short on here (the yarn) again, you can take these off (the pegs) and then you can shorten up the drawstring. so, go aheadand pull all these loops off the peg they're safe now, not going anywhere.

okay i'm going to pull this off and take our strand okay, we've got our drawstring, now we'rejust gonna pull it. and before we finish, go aheadand put your drawstring on the inside, okay? and flip it inside out. now this is the part where i had tied on showing you tying on another color, or fixing another strand [earlier in the video] so we're just gonna go ahead and pull this drawstring shut, just like a pair pants or something

and we're going to tie a knot. just asimple knot will do because it's on the inside the hat if you wanted to you could just tie the knot cut it off. but it's best toget it to go through it several points with thetapestry needle and make sure that it's really in theirgood. you can thread a tapestry needle and go in and out of here several times.i have a video on how to do that and what i wanna show you is, lets say i gotit tight enough then i'm actually going to cut this andlet it just stay inside here

because no one will see that. and now flip it inside and out (again) and i wanna show you what this looks like see how this is nice and smooth? itdoesn't have any extra crumpled or bulkiness. it's not bumpy. normally the drawstring would looklike this so this is nice and smooth; and then i want you to see the rolled edge here. this rolled edge here is this rolled edge here is ....this is a "nobrim" (brimless) or "rolled" brim this is a brimless hat and it has this edge here.

people can roll it up. now it has this rolling effect because it's an e-wrap stitch. and this is just a great littlebasic first hat to learn..and also to give as a gift. (preemie & newborn 24 peg) again, you can make them different lengths, and accommodate a different baby size head if you want a larger hat for largerbaby (30 or 31 peg) you can step it up to a 30 or 31 pegloom for a bigger circumference and for anadult you can just put in this 36 peg loom

or there's actually a 48 peg loom fromknifty knitter, now it is discontinued, but all these different looms will makedifferent size hats; it is the same technique for this if you look up online it will show youdifferent hat lengths that you might need. so i thank you very much. and also keepin mind there are other brands out there this just happens to be what i have if you wanna learn how to do the(easier) decreased bind off (another video) or the "decreased crown" (as shown here) look for my other videos on thesedifferent looms. i hope that helps you today

thanks again for joining me at goodknitkisses. have a great day and happy looming! don't forget tosubscribe and also check out our facebook page for our goodknitkisses loom knit and craft club for 24/7 of experience of other loomers and crafters out there,willing to help you and have fun posting your photos! bye-bye!


Knitting Machine Jumper Pattern


is that working? great. hi! i'm super excitedto be here and speaking at jsconf. my name is mariko. that's my twitterhandle. i should be automatically tweeting this slide, linkedto this slide, so if you're in the back and you want to see that, you can findit there. i will be joining a company called (inaudible) next week, which-- i'm super excited about that. but today i'm not going to talk about softwareengineering. i'm going to talk about knitting. and just in case you'rewondering, like if you are at the wrong conference, i will assure youthat i will have enough math and code examples for you to be interested. justfor the guideline, i have a

visual relation down on the slide. so theblue dots are indications that the slide has some kind of math reference,computer science reference. the radius of the circle is how many scoopsof ice cream i served myself after i figured that out. the yellow dots are somerandom gif animations, because why not? so i like knitting. i'vebeen doing knitting for quite a while. i think the first time i was doingit i was seven years old. it's something i've always done. once a year, comewinter, i knit a scarf or mitten. something very simple. nothing crazylike having an etsy store or anything. so here's a few of my projects thati've done in recent years. one

winter, i think three years ago, was a veryspecial winter for me, because i learned to javascript while i wasalso working on this green scarf project. and i started to notice really interestingpower of computer programming and the process of knitting.so, for example, when you get started -- like, if you've never knitsomething, knitting might look like this. seven-year-old me was like-- i'm never going to be able to figure this out, this thing that mom and grandmais doing. so intimidating. my experiences programming, the first time,was just installing npm install on a terminal. it was so confusing. wordsflying around, and is my laptop

being hacked? and like what's going on? but we all know that once you've done it,once, and know, like, what exactly it's doing, you know, it's not soscary at all. the other thing -- computer programming is very binary. knittingis very binary. the atomic unit, the smallest unit that you can do istwo stitches, which is knit stitch and purl stitch. knit stitch is thestitch that you pull the yarn from the back of the loop, and purl stitch is theyarn -- you push the yarn in front of the loop. and those two stitchescreate two distinct faces of fabric. and the combination of those two,much like we say -- programming

is ones and zeroes -- creates a pattern inthe fabric. so the green side of the fabric, which is 2x2 ribbing, whichis commonly used for the cuff of your sweater or the neckline of your sweater,is two knit stitch, two purl stitch, alternating each other, and thengoing row by row. the other side of the pattern is the one i took frommy sweater, which is a little more intricate, making a diagonal line. butif you look closely, it's just knit and purl stitch. just one stitch by onestitch, shifting to the left to create a diagonal line. knitters havea github, actually. it's called ravelry. people log in, you can putyour patterns, sell your

patterns, star somebody's projects, and showyour photos. it's a central repository of knowledge that you do with knitting.and speaking of a central repository, code for knitting -- the knittingpattern -- looks like this. and i thought this was totally -- looked likecode. because there is, like, some letters that are kind of repeating,and maybe kind of like a variable, that's accessing the same informationagain and again. and there's more explicit loop indications. likeknit until two stitches remaining. or repeat row one to four, forten times. this brings me to -- i could pseudoknit in javascript. so i tookthis code, which was a scarf

pattern, very simple scarf pattern, put itinto 30 lines of javascript, to visualize what this would look like, virtually.and this is what i came out. you know, it is... it turned out it'sonly using a knit stitch. it's not a purl stitch. so it's okay. and it'sa knit scarf. so making a triangular shape. which is all right. i canunderstand that. so i actually knit that pattern myself, and i haveit here. but it turns out it didn't quite become triangular.instead, it became like an arc. so in my code, those yellowstripes should be straight, flat lines. but then it became an arc. andi was like... this is only 30

lines of javascript. and i write javascriptprofessionally. like, where is my bug? i can't figure that out. so i haveit here. where my four stitches started here, two inches or so, andi knit it down. and if i force the fabric to see it, you could saythis is like a straight line, but in fact, it ended up being an arc of a scarf.so why? i did a little bit of research and found out that what i was discoveringwas something called hyperbolic geometry in math. and i was like...okay. in knitting, we call it ruffles. so i didsome more research, and there were three kinds of geometry to describe,and they both use one perfectly

straight line. the one we're familiar is euclideanspace, which -- you have a baseline, and then parallel to that, you haveanother line that will never meet the baseline again. so it's very2d. the other one is spherical space, where the straight lines are on thesphere. however you place it, it will always meet each other. and the thirdone is a hyperbolic space, which -- there is a baseline, and the straight line,infinite number of straight lines, can be drawn. and it turns out thishyperbolic geometry is a hard problem to solve in computer graphics,because it's hard to model. researcher at cornell actually created a physicalmodel of hyperbolic

geometry in knitted fabric. in her case, createdin crotchet. and here's her paper about how she created the hyperbolicplane. so when i discovered this, i just stumbled upon a problem making ruffles.but when i discovered this is an actual math problem behind my ruffle, iwas like -- this is great. i want to do more of this. i want to discovermore about pattern making, and i want to do this. the problem was that knittingis a very slow process. like, this scarf -- itself, take maybe five daysof solid work. so... eight hours a day? and if you think about softwareengineer salary -- this is a very expensive piece of scarf. so i didmore research about -- how can i

test out my patterns? and stumbled upon thisthing, called a knitting machine. which i have never knew that thisexisted. but apparently it existed for home use, available to your house,since 1890. and this is the ad from that era. and furthermore,interesting, as a native japanese, was that the knitting machine wasa very popular thing to own in the household, in the '70s and '80s japan. andpeople were offering local classes, people owned a knitting machine likeyou would own a sewing machine. i found one tv commercial on youtube aboutthis knitting machine from 1979. if you can get the audio.

(song in japanese with female vocalist) (male narrator speaking japanese) (female vocalist singing in japanese) all right. so i am as confused as you areto see this tv commercial for one different reason. the song that was inthe background, the lyrics said that creating a special original pattern knitwearis like sending a secret love letter to your loved one. and i thoughtthat was kind of creepy, but apparently... things to do in the '70s! ilived in new york city when i discovered this, so i couldn't really go downto local classes. so i don't

even know if that's offered in tokyo now.but i made a short trip to ebay. spent a couple hundred dollars to buy thismachine. and i got it, i set it up, and i was like... okay. i'm goingto set this up. and create all of the patterns, and i'm going to be awesome,and create sweaters. turns out... operating the machine, even beforegoing into creating a pattern, was a lot of work. the machine was made in the '80s. it was sittingin somebody's closet for a long time. it was missing the manuals. soi ended up -- the next two months, just researching all kinds of stuff on japaneseblog posts about machine

knitting. possibly watched every single youtubevideo about machine knitting that's posted. many of them are japanese.occasional trip to a free preview version of google books, because icouldn't go to a japanese bookstore down the street from my parents'house and pick up the book. i never thanked myself enough to be able tospeak japanese. because all of the stuff, great stuff, was available in japanese.and i just get to angry, when software only offers documentation inenglish. certain things i could not understand. but in knitting, atleast i got my turn to just do things in japanese. on top of figuring outhow to operate the machine, i

actually needed to fix the machine. so i figuredout how to operate this machine. moving back and forth. but it wasn'tknitting quite right. something was missing. and basically i flippedthe carriers, looking at examining what exactly it's supposed to do,and what each path is doing. and after looking at maybe four hours of,like, mechanics of things, i found out that one piece of thing was stuckin there. and just a jiggle -- it worked perfectly! and so finally, i gotto knit a fabric out of the machine. and i was like... this is great.one thing about this machine is it's known for something called jacquard knitor fair isle knit, or pattern

knit, if you're familiar with those terms.the term jacquard comes directly from the jacquard loom, which isa different kind of machine that creates a fabric, and uses a punch cardto input the data. and this punch card system, the punch card loom, becamethe base of the modern computer. which -- i thought this was a greatdiscovery. when i did the research and learned about it, i was so excited.so... the machine is based on that. and you see on the '70s ad -- themachine actually had a punch card feeder. so you create your own punch card,and then feed it into the punch card feeder, and that will translate the patternfor you. my machine is

coming from the '80s, so it is an electroknit.it's actually the name of the model. it's called the electroknit. andwhat does that mean? it no longer has a feeder for a bunch card. butit has a mother board and chip and magnetic strip. you use an electromagnet topush and pull the needles automatically. it's a lot like dot matrix printing, if youare familiar with a dot matrix printer. one pixel becomes one stitch. soin this machine's case, i feed it a yellow and blue yarn, the needle that's pushedforward is grabbing a contrasting color, which is blue, and thenthe needle that was left behind

is grabbing a base color, which is yellow.that's how they create a pattern. so that means i can create some kind of graphic-- anything. in this case, the jsconf logo. and then put it into knittedfabric. and i was like... i found out how to operate this machine, i fixed thismachine. this shouldn't be a problem. i'm going to do this. turns outit was not that easy. not even... so there was so many things that you neededto figure out. which is indicated in that blue dot. even before you actually put the data intothe machine. so first question was like -- how do i even make bitmap image?because if you're using

photoshop, you just load the colored photoin, select grayscale, and select the bitmap method, and it will automaticallyfeed the bitmap for you. but i need to do this in code.how do i programmatically do that? let's start with just learning aboutimages, and loading the image. i used a library called graphics magic and thennpm package gm, which wraps that library. i actually started by usingphantomjs, creating a canvas in phantom, loading the image, andusing the phantom api to extract all of the data, which worked fine, but itwas very slow. and gm was suggested to me as a faster alternative. andit worked perfectly.

so when you load a file into gm as a textfile, this is what you get. xy coordinates of the pixel. rgb value of thecolor, and then also the hex value for that color. so all you do is a handy-dandyregexing, and create an array of arrays for each pixel. so now i havergb color for each pixel. let's get on it and make it grayscale? but how doi grayscale? i spent two hours just looking at a single wikipedia pageabout grayscaling, and the engineer from adobe confirmed that's okay.so i'm confident about my explanation here. you have rgb value for eachcolor. in this case, pink and green. you find the highest value foreach color. in this case, pink,

red is the highest value. green, green isthe highest value. you repeat that number, and then you get the grayscalecolor. so now you load the image in gm. you get allof the color. and you have three color -- rgb value array. you just findthe max value out of the array, and then you have an array of just the maxvalue. and you can use that to create a grayscale image. so i was like...this is black and white photography. so i can just load it in, becauseit's black and white. but the grey scale image is actually black andwhite and many shades of grey in between. and my machine only has two colors.so it has to be just two colors.

nothing in the shades of grey. so my firstupload was to split it in half. anything closer to white side gets white,and anything closer to black side gets black. and it turns out like this.something like... what came out of a fax machine. i wasn't really happywith that. so i was like... this is my favorite game when i grew up. when i was growing up. and this only used,like, black and white, and it operated beautifully in my tiny apple computer.so i literally googled cosmic osmo graphics and figured out that i neededto do something called dithering. which -- the wikipedia article said it wasan intentionally applied form

of noise. i don't really understand, but okay.gm has built-in methods for it. so i did that. it turns out better thanmy method. but still... somewhere around the area is missing a definition.and i wasn't quite happy with it. i did more research, and something-- discovered that the thing i needed to do was something called ordereddithering, or half tone screening, which is used for newspapers totranslate that picture into a newspaper, which is just one color of ink.so you have a base image. which you extracted the value for the grayscale.and then you have this noise matrix part. you laid it over. you comparethe overlapping pixels. and

if the base image has a lower value than yournoise matrix, then it gets zero. if it's over, then it gets one. andthat's how you make it into two color images. and of course, if it's like...one and two, you can put it into ones and zeroes -- matrix. here's a few examples of that noise matrix.and a lot of people explore their own matrix to create a better dithered image.i ended up using bayer, because i like the output most. so now i loadedthe jsconf logo and outputted it as ones and zero pictures. andif i replace the zero with no value and one with asterisk, you can see somethinglike this. and it's

starting to look like something on the knittedfabric. so i'm like -- great. i've got files. let's just put it intothe machine and just knit. let's make knitting pattern files. the fileformat for this is something called .dat. which i think stands for digitalaudio tape? no idea. if you open it up, you get ones and zeroes. okay.great. binary file. just replace my one and zero matrix and put it in. buti found out if the pattern is in there, it's actually hex. so i'm like... somethingneeds to be done in my one and zero matrix. into this file. what do ido? there was one guy, steve conklin, who is writingthe same kind of project in

python. so i studied his code, and discoveredthis line. and at the time, i was a newbie python developer. so i was learningpython. and i'm like... what is this? i just went through python'stutorial. nothing was mentioned about bitwise operator. how couldi not have heard of this? i just went through training. and i felt like this.i also found out that the bitwise operator existed in javascript, andread an article, and still couldn't really get what it is. so what iconcluded, after two days of, like, you know... throwing balls againstwalls, was that this is like magic. and this is my interpretationof what bitwise operator and bit

shifting is. so i'm going to give you twoexamples. two operations that i use for this machine. one is a bitwiseleft shift. left shift is a guy or fellow who pushes you to the left. andhe's a magician, because it's a bitwise operator. so he has a magic hat. soa is the small value of one. and let's bit shift forward to the left. so therepresentation of this small one is that. and this left shift guycomes in, pushes you four times to the left, and because he is a magician,he makes it to 16. like, how... what... how could that happen? okay. and the bitwise or operator -- the samething. this person favors

one over zero, and he's also a magician. solet's do bitwise or, with 1 and 5. representation of the 1 and 5 is that.first compares 1 and 1. there is only 1, so he chooses 1. there's 0 and 0.so there's no 1, so okay. 0. and next one is 1 and 0. so okay... 1. andbecause it's magic, it stays as 5, even though you just did something. but itstays as 5. so... i needed to do bitshifting, and if you're interested, i'mhappy to share the code, but my one and zero matrix shifted into one set ofthe decimal value of a, shifted again, became one number, and then turnedthat decimal number into hex, and i can finally put it into my knittingmachine. so now i have the file

prepared. and put it into the machine. andnow i want to demo the machine. okay. so i just turned it in. i pre-loadeda file this morning. i used usb to serial port cable. which the tutorial of howto make is available online. and... just select... you might not be ableto see it. but i'm selecting a custom pattern that i created. it says onetime. stitch of 90. okay. start. i changed the setting. make sure this is okay.and now... something interesting should happen. (grinding noises) see? these needles are pushed forward. thismeans that this carriage

uses magnetics to pull those needles, andnow these needles that are pushed forward are picking up this blue yarn.and... all right! now the pattern is done. i canjust discharge this. take this out. actually, just leave it there. you maynot be able to see it from the front. but it actually printed out the jsconf2015 logo. and after that, i'll finish this scarf, and i can show it to youin person, if you're interested. (applause) woo!

oh, how kind! thank you! so going into thisproject, i had no idea what i was doing. i just wanted to do knitting.and i discovered that knitting and javascript are kind of related. that turnedinto, like, finding out about this machine, and i wanted to do this.i had no reservation about trying to sound smart. this wasn't my job. so wheneveri go into a problem, i just tweet out or send emails about it, and somany people just jumped right in, sending me code samples, and giving meencouragement and all of that. so i just want to give a shout out.thank you! and most of the code will be available on electroknit repo, whichright now is empty, but i promise

i will put it up. and a subset from that project-- the part i was doing, the color math -- i was super interestedin it. and i added more features about translation between color spacesand created a small library for you to... what do you call it? explorethe color. and that's available on the color mixer repo, or npm module. sothank you!


How To Get Knitting Ideas For Baby Boy


in today's tutorial, we're going to do apair of baby booties, and i'm going to be teaching you the three month's sizeand the pattern's available for the six and 12 month sizes as well. in today's tutorial, we are going to makethese rolled down cuff baby booties, just like you see here. we have the fullcomplete pattern, it's not a complex pattern, it's quite easy to do. we're going to be doing the cuff areahere, and then doing the baby booties. now it does have a difference of yarn,you can either choose to use, what we have is the bernat handicraftercotton or the sugar lily and cream, or

you could also use bernat satin yarn aswell, and you can see that the instructions are included with differentsizes. so you have the sizes three and then six and twelve. so whenever we go to read instructions,just like you see here, the three, this is a three month is the first number, the six month's is the second number, andthe third number there is the 12 months. and every time there is a change of size,you will see that. so in the in step here, it's miss the first seven for thefirst size, miss the first eight for the next size, and miss the next nine for the nextsize. so it gives you an idea of what to

do. so today we're going to need a fourmillimeter, size g crochet hook today and let's get started right after this. let's get started using a size g, fourmillimeter crochet hook. i am going to use bernat handicrafter yarn today and itis a cotton yarn that's kind of perfect yarn for those that are in the south,that are pretty hot temperatures. cotton really does a great job and being ableto keep babies cool when you need to be. so starting off with the slip knot onthe hook, never counts as one. we are going to chain sixteen, and we're going tocreate the cuff that is rolled down. so

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, and 16. so now that i've got sixteen, i am going to do asingle crochet all the way to the other side. so skipping to the second chain onthe hook, so just go one and two, go to the second turn it over, get the back part of the stitch only, andjust single crochet, and single crochet all the way across back to the beginningof the chain. now that i'm all the way back to theother side, i just want to turn my work and start row number two.

so we have to create this cuff until youget six and a half inches, or six inches long for the small size, the other sizesare listed there. so what we have to do for the second row,we chain up one, and if you're new to crochet, you may not know what a front loop, backloop is. so both stitch, both strings that you see here are a stitch. if you go into the first string that'sclosest to you, that is the front loop, and if you gointo the back one that's farthest away from you, that's a back loop.

so what you have to do is, every time youturn around you have to chain up one and go into the back loop only of the stitch,and single crochet, and you were going to continue to do that. just back loop only, and this is creatingthe cuffs that you see that's within the booties. so you just need to go back and forth onthe back loops only until this particular piece measures six inches, ifyou're doing the three month sizes with me. so i will leave that with you, sojust have to keep going back and forth, and when we come back, i will have thecuff completely done, and then we'll move

on to the next part of the tutorial. iwon't have it sewn up or anything. i'll meet you back at that point as well. socontinue along and i'll see you in just a moment. so i'm coming up to the end, and thishappens to be my six inch mark of length that i measured up against, and what iwant to do now is that we need to work our way along the side of the ridge here.so it says in the pattern that we need to get twenty-three equally single crochetedspaces in here. now the thing about it is, that everyridge that you see popping out here, it represents two rows, so 1, so i got 2,4, 6,

8, 10, 12, 14, 16, 18, and 19, which means thatevery row cannot equals one single crochet each. so this means that at certain pointsi have to add an extra. so to begin to do this, okay, we need to chain up one, and we justhave to equally space twenty-three, so i'm going to go 1 and 2, and then the next onei'm going to put two into there, so 3 and 4, and then i'm going tojust keep moving along, 5, 6, 7, and the next one, i'm going to add two intothat one. 8, 9, and keep moving along, 10, 11, 12.

i'm going to add two into the next one 13and 14 and 15 and 16. i'm going to add two into the next one 17,18, 19, 20, 21, 22, and 23. so how did i figure that out soquickly? i have experience with crochet. so even though it's evenly spaced, thereis two in a few of those in order to bring me back to twenty-three. so let's move on and we're going to turnour work and go up and do one more row across. so we chain up one and wesingle crochet into each one of the stitches along, and then we're going tofasten off on the other side. so i'll meet you there in just a moment.

so now just come up all the way to theend, and i want to fasten off and we're just going to snip our yarn and this willconclude that. okay, so we just got to weave in yourends. just do a nice job of it. we have to move on to the next part ofthis tutorial. of course at the end, you can always hide your tails in a lotbetter with the darning needle, but i just want to get them out of my way fornow, and then move on to the next part of thistutorial. so this is what we have right here. this is the top of the boot here, itwill roll down, like so. and so, then this becomes the top of the foot area andwe're going to do that next.

so now i want to hold my project upsidedown, or to put into basically the way i was holding it before, and i want to bevery conscious of where we are at this particular point. and so when wefasten it, when we did the first row, this was the right side and then we did this.this is the wrong side. so we have to turn it back. okay, so justremember how to do that. so we have to start off by missing a certain amount ofstitches before we can join our yarn. but, i'm just going to put a slip knot on my hook and i'm going to begin to count. so it says that, says with the rightside, okay, rs, it says to join by missing thefirst seven stitches. i'm going to count.

so 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7. so i think i'm going to go into the eighth here. okay, so it does say that is a singlecrochet, and do a join into the next stitch. just going to join it. okay and then, and so i got a join, and then it says todo, what does it say? chain one and single crochet into the same space. got it. just like that, and then it saysto do one single crochet in the same space as the last slip stitch, which isfine, and then one single crochet in each

of the next eight and then turn. so the next eight is all going to bethis. so 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8. just like this. okay, so this is what wehave going on here, so this is where the instep is. sowe're going to turn our work and begin the next row. so rows two, three and four are going to be the same thing. chain up one and one single crochetacross. so please do this for rows number one, two, sorry, for two, three, and four.

okay, rows two, three, and four, just singlecrochet across and this is a row number two. please do that, and i'll meet you at theend of row number four. so i've just finished row number fourhere, so i turned my work and ready for row number five. so this is the finalpart of the top part of the instep. so what we want to do, is that we want tochain up one, and we are going to put a single crochet two together, and in thefirst one. so the first two is going to, the first stitch is just in, pull through, going into the next stitch, pull through,and then pull through all three loops. now it says to do one single crochet ineach of the next five. so 1, 2, 3,

4, and 5, leaving you with two stitches left, andyou're going to do it two together there as well. just like that. okay and what we want to doat this point, is that we want to fasten this off. so let's just trim our work outand fasten this off. this is the top of the instep. okay and you can do a better job of thatif you wish as well, and what it says to do is that we have to sew the back seam.so we're going to be able to just go along, and just come along, and sew theback seam together, so that we can do it,

like this, and i'll show you that in justa moment. so taking a darning needle what we wantto do is we want to put the same color yarn, same material, into a darning needleand we want to sew the back seam of the bootie shut. okay, so let's just create a slip knot here.i like to do that just for extra security, and what i want to do is that iwant to put the two seams together like this. and i'm going to start at thebottom here and just work my way across. so just jump in here and across, pullthrough, and pull it to get to the slip knot and slip the needle through the slip knot, like this. and i want you just

to work back through the seam, to theback of the bootie here, and just doing a whipstitch. just up and over. it helps if you trim out your otherspare yarns that you've been working with before you do this, but that's okay. soi just want to work my way up the seam. i don't want to do anything crazy likepulling it way too tight. i just want to do a nice job with the stitches and justkind of match these up as we go, and i will leave that to you and i'll seeyou at the top of this seam line. so now that i'm at the top, what i wantto do is i just want to create a little knot that's in here. so just slidethe needle underneath some fibers and

just put it through the loop like so. nowthe best way to hide the tails and that will never fall out, is that you glide the hook underneathsome fibers. don't go to the good side of thisproject. just glide in one direction and then come back and go into a differentarea, but the same path in the other direction, and then back into athird down. what happens is that the tails will never fall out, because it'sbeen wrapped perfectly each and every time. so what we want to do is that we justwant to trim this yarn now.

and this is my starting string, but thewhat we have here is on the other side, here we have the bootie itself. so let's begin. we're going to, i'm goingto leave in some of these tails that i have. going to do a nice job and theni'll meet you back and we'll continue along with the base. so this is what itskind of looking like at this moment. to begin the next part, you now got to turnit inside out. so that the seam is on the inside of the bootie. just in here, andthis is the good side that you're looking at. so if your baby is wearingthat, you're looking at the good side. so eventually what's going to happen isthat this will roll down and you have

the nice cuff area at the top of theboots. so let's begin. we're going to move downand start doing the foot next. so grabbing our yarn, what we wantto do, is we want to start crocheting around here, and we want to do it in away that the back is going to be matching the top of the instep. so let's just create a slipknot. we'regoing to join it in the back of the seam line area. okay, so we're just going to join it rightin the back. might be kind of tight there, and join. just join it in, like so, and itsays to chain two, which counts as a half

double crochet. so 1 and 2, leaving this straggler down on top ofthe line. it just as a lot easier for you to follow. so it says to put one half doublecrochet in each of the next stitches as six stitches. so if you count, there should be six stitches here. so 1, 2,3, 4, 5, 6. that is no camera trick, that is the real deal, which is hard to believefor me. so 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6. usually i screw up in these booties too bad as i'm fine.

so we're going to do six half doublecrochets. so 1, 2, 3, 3, and 4, 5, and 6. now it says to put in seven half doublecrochets down the side of the instep. so there should be a total of seven here.you might need to squeeze them in, so just continue to go. i'm gonna go rightin the corner here, so i'm actually going to go in the side here to 1 and 2. i'mjust equally spacing it, 3. i'm going to put another one there, 4, 5, and 6, andput another one in that is 7. so there's my seven and then it says toput in two half double crochets in the

corner. single crochet so it right inthe corner here i'm going to put two. so 1 and 2, and then it says to putfive half double crochets along the top of the instep. so there should be five there. so let'sdo this so 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 which takes me then to the next corner, and in thecorner, it's going to be two half double crochets. 1 and 2, and then we have toput another seven down the in the seam again. so we just got to equally space that. so1, going to put another one there, 2, 3,

4, 5. yep, another one there, 6, oops, thatwas supposed to be 6. 6 and the final one is 7. and then it says to put a halfdouble crochet in each of the next seven stitches. so i'm just going to count itjust for the sake of it. so 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7 that takes me right back to thevery beginning. so let's just do that so 1, 2, 3, 4, forthose 4, this is 5, 6, and 7 and i want to join this then to the top of the firstchain two, just like this, to pull it nice and tight together like there. okay, sothat's kind of how it looks like at this particular moment. looking pretty good, isn't it? so let's move along and second round forthe foot area. now for the second row

what we're going to do is that we aregoing to create a ridge that looks like it's part of like a sole, basically. sowe're going to count our chain two and it says to create what is called a doublecrochet back post. so each one of these stitches that we work with, we're goingto be working from the back post only. okay, so what we're going to do is thatwe are just going to insert from the back. so let's begin. so this is onedouble crochet back post in each, going all the way around. so we wrap the hook,and coming from the back, out from the side, and then back to the other side fora back post, and we double crochet. so that, and we do that for each stitchgoing all the way around. so we're not

adding any stitches or subtracting anystitches. were simply just doing a back post double crochet in each of thestitches going all the way around, and this creates a really beautiful linewhen it comes to your booties. okay, so you have a beautiful line there. so again just comefrom the back post and do a double crochet back post all the way around anddo tha,t and i'll see you at the end of this round. so you're going to come all the way backaround. i have one more left and then i'm just going to join it with a slipstitch to the top of the beginning chain

two. so here's the thing, i'm running out ofthis green, so i'm going to switch off color. so i'm going to completely fasten off at this moment. technically you wouldn't if you're going to carry on,but actually it might be a good thing, because i can make the bottom ofthe sole something completely different for different color. so i'm just going tofasten this off. you're not supposed to, but you can if you want to, because it isyour creativity. you can do what you want. so let me just grab, go to the yarncloset, and see what's there, and i'll be back, and i'll grab another color of thecotton yarn. so for round number three,

and we have to do exactly what we didand i'm going to start off with this pink. now i've seen this color combo done inboots before. looks really quite sharp, if you ask me, but that's my personalopinion. so we have to then join it to where wehave done the chaining of two last time. okay, and that's where i kind of fastened off before and we want to chain another two. so i just fastening on and then 1 and 2. so for this entire round is exactly whatwe had in the last one. so again from the

back post only, just do double crochets.and you'll do that with every stitch all the way around. so i've already shown youhow to do that. it's going to be easier to access this time around because thestitches are bigger than they were in the last round. so it's just a matter ofdoing it. okay, so back post double crochet into each,going all the way around, and i'll see you back here in just a moment. so i'm just finishing up and i'm comingall the way back around and i'm going to join it to the top of the beginningchain two. and so this is what it looks like at this moment. kinda neat.

so let's begin. we're going to go withfourth round. and the fourth round we're going to start getting smaller as we startcreating the bottom of the sole. okay, so let's begin. we're going to chainone and it says single crochet two together over the first two stitches. soin the first step, we're going to yarn over, pull through,and in the second stitch, yarn over, pull through. you'll have three loops on your hook.you're going to pull through all three. okay, now it says to do fourteen single crochetsin a row. so we're going to count these out, so 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8,

9, 10, 11, 12, 13, and 14. so now, what we have, is that we have toput in a single crochet two together. and we have to do that one in the next one.so the next two are together, so just put them, to put them together. the next oneis a single crochet by itself, and then the next one is together as well. so whatyou're just going to do is you're going to single crochet yourself all the wayback to the back of the heel, but in the final two stitches, you're going to putthe last two together. okay, so make sure you do that. so we're justsingle crocheting. so you could either count it, but because i told you that, youcan just simply just single crochet

yourself all the way to the back of theboot, and the final two stitches will be together. okay, so i got two stitches left here, sojust in, pull through, in, pull through, make them together, and then just join itto the beginning with a slip stitch. okay, so let's begin the next row. begin rownumber five. we're going to chain one and put the first two together. so in the first one, pull through, nextone, pull through. okay, so the first two are together, and nowit says that we need to count twelve this time. so 1, so twelve single crochets in arow. so that was 1, 2, 3, 4, 5,

6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, and 12, and now the next two together. so just put the next two together. okay, the next one is a single crochet andthen the next two are together. so these two are together now and now wejust have to single crochet ourselves all the way back to the start again, and the final two are going to be two together at the end. so you notice how i count when i get tothe halfway spot where i know, i know i have to put those two together, but knowing that i'm coming back to theback of the heel i'm basically i'm just

relying on instinct and orders insteadof having to count. okay, so here we go we have the last twostitches to be put together and i think that was the last one right there. so the last two are right here, and then we just join it to thebeginning single crochet that we started with, just like there. okay so that's whatit looks like so far. let's move along to round number six.round number 6, we just have one more round after this, but let's begin roundnumber 6 we're going to chain one. the first two are together and so we'rejust going to put the two together, just

like that, and it says for number six, there's gonna be ten now, so in a row, so1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10 and the next two are together. so let's put thosetogether. the next one is a single crochet, and then the next two aretogether. just like there and then the rest of them are all just going to be singlecrochets all the way back and the final two will be two together. so what we're doing is we're creatingthe underside of the sole. we just have one more round left and then we justhave to sew the seam line at the bottom out the stock, of the bootie.

so we're coming back to the start. wejust got to keep an eye on where we are. the last two are going to be together. so here's together and then just join itto the first one. tip so let's move along and we're going to round number seven,the final round of these booties for today. so the final round, we're going to chainup one. the first two are together and for number seven, we have to crochet foreight in a row for the next, so 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7, and then the next two are to ourseven and then eight, sorry and then the next two are together andthen the one next one is by itself and

then the next two are together, like that,and then the rest of them all the way to the back is going to be one singlecrochet with the exception to the final. tthe final two have to be together as well.so this concludes on how to do this particular bootie we're going to do theseam line at the bottom of the of the bootie where we're going to bring ittogether. so we're just looking for the very end here. okay, so one and put those two together andthen just join it to the beginning. so what i would do is not fasten of this yarn like really short, just leave it so you can run the darning needle throughit, and what i would do that as well, is

that we should turn this booie insideout and make sure the seam goes on the inside. so let's turn the bootie inside out sothat the seam will be on the inside of the bootie. okay, so we just gotta put a sewingneedle through here and just bring this okay, so let's do that next. so we're goingto put a darning needle onto this strand and we're going to sew it shut. so the trick is is that when you go todo this you want to kind of make it look as close as you can to the to being theright shape and so you just want to go

back and forth with the whip stitch,along both sides of the seam. now babies, they can put their feet up in the airquite a bit so you kind of want to be conscientious of how you're doing the bottom of the bootie. you know other mothers will judge. youknow it is, we're not supposed to but we okay, so we're just going to just whipstitch our way across the bottom to bring the seam shut. it's kind of like the icing on the cake. it's kind of like the finishing touches,you feel like you got something done. and

so you just gonna have to repeat thisfor a second pair. just watch your counts. if you'refollowing the pattern, it just makes it a lot easier. i had a history and when i first startedcrocheting is that my booties were never the same size. (laughing) okay, so we're just coming up all the wayand i'm just finishing up. so i want to come in and i want to just tie a littlebit of a knot with the yarn strand and you don't want your tails coming out, sothe secret to doing that is that if you put your hook in or your needle in, inone direction,

pull through, and through a differentpath but in the other direction and then a different path into that of anotherdirection, is that you'll never have the tails falling out of your work. so we can just simply just clean up thework, like that. just get rid of all these loose littletails. i'm just going to trim this oneafterward and i'm going to turn it back to the way it should be, and let's give it a brief inspection. okay, so here's what it would look like andyou can roll down the booties

or you can roll them up depending onwhat you're up to and you just have to shape the bottom of the foot a littlebit better. just give it a good few tugs and thiswould be how you would do one of those baby booties with the roll-down tops, just like so. so until next time, i'm mikey, on behalf of the crochet crowd, as well as yarnspirations.com, thanks so muchfor joining me today and until next time. hopefully, we have some more freepatterns and etc. available to you real soon. until then, we'll see you. bye bye.


5 Best Knitting Pattern For 6 Year Old Boy


thank you very much, i am very honored to be here, i love chicago. and i'm very very grateful to deloris, for this wonderful honor, and really for her ongoing work, and her lifelong work, in trying to help all of us understand the importance of early childhood, and the role that safety, predictability, nurturing, play, in shaping who we become as individuals, and in turn

what that means for the health and welfare of a culture. i know there's a lot of things that i could talk about, and i have a limited amount of time, i'm actually a very shy person, and so, when i prepare for things like this, i always struggle with what i should say, and what is worth talking about, and i almost always end up settling on things

that are probably bigger than my capability to teach, i think one of the biggest challenges that we have in the modern era, and really in any era, is figuring out how to make the world better, for our children and our grandchildren. how do we take the things that we have learned from our parents and our ancestors, and our neighbors, and our educational systems, and whatever means

we have used to become who we are, how do we take that information, and sort through it and decide what parts of that are worth passing on, and what parts of that should not be passed on? and the interesting thing about our species, is that we are really more capable of this process of trans-generational change than any other species on the planet.

other species learn, and pass their learnings on to the next generation, but no species can do it with the same efficiency and effectiveness that human beings can, and the reason we're able to do that is, we have a brain that is unique in its ability to absorb and store information at rates faster than any other species. so, because we can do that, we're able to take accumulated

experiences of thousands of previous generations, dilute it, distill it, and pass it on. and your brain allows you to do that, particularly the top parts of your brain, the neo cortex, which is, most uniquely human genetically, and it's most uniquely human in the functions it mediates, so you've got lots of different parts of your

brain, parts of your brain that mediate moving your fingers, and parts of the brain that mediate forming relationships, and parts of the brain that mediate learning mathematics, and all of these capabilities are part of who you are, yet the most creative, the most complex, the most malleable part of your brain, is this top part of our brain, that we use to store and to create

values, moral beliefs, it's the part of the brain that makes us most human. and it's a part of the brain that really is involved in this process of social- cultural evolution. you know, it's an interesting thing that generation after generation after generation we change, so if you think about this now, there are people in this room, who were

young children when there wasn't routinely a television in your home. you know, my grandmother was born before there were routinely cars in the street, before there were planes in the air, and the rate of change in the last several generations, has been faster problem solving to deal with that level of change, it's an interesting thing, think about it, right here in thisroom,

we're looking at a screen, that's an invention, i'm speaking english, that's an invention, i'm wearing a jacket, which is an invention, and a tie, you know i'm not sure where this came from, but this is an invention. i always wonder, who came up with the idea of wrapping some stuff around your neck in a special way, and that is somehow a signification of respect. it's

kind of a weird thing, but... but we've invented lots of other things, right? we've invented child rearing practices, we've invent the concept of a nuclear family, is an invention. we've invented good things and bad things, and the good things that we've invented, i think, like reading, is an invention. this is a really fascinating thing, right? i mean the human brain, has

really genetically had the potential to learn how to read ten thousand years ago, twenty thousand years ago, but there wasn't a single human being on the planet who read ten thousand years ago, not a single human being. yet right now, in our current united states, we spend a finite amount of the energy, and resources that we have, that we dedicate to childhood,

to teaching them how to read. it's an interesting shift, it reflects a set of deliberate, intentional choices about what we are providing for our children. we intentionally teach them math, we intentionally teach them geography, we intentionally teach them a lot of things. and some families, right, there's some intentions that are culture-wide, there's

some intentions that are family based, right? my family says, "okay, let's teach children how to play the piano." other families say, "let's value sports." and so, depending upon what your family's values are, what your community's values, what your culture's values are, you provide patterned, repetitive experiences that motor, social, emotional, cognitive, and you literally, by virtue of

that, you are expressing different parts of that individual's potential, and creating the present. and some of the things we've invented are good, and some of the things we've invented are not so good. we pass on lots of things, both in intentional ways, and in inertial ways that are not so good. and when i say inertial, what i mean by that is, that there are a lot of

things that go from generation to generation to generation, that if you ask people in that generation, "did you really want to pass this on to the next generation?" they'd say, "no!" we don't want to pass on racism, i don't think anybody in this room says, "hey, let's pass on racism to the next generation!" or, "let's pass on misogyny!"

but we do, we pass it on, do we want to pass on solving problems using power dominance and violence? no, we don't, in fact, we explicitly write that we shouldn't do that, in fact we spend billions of dollars developing anti-bullying programs and all kinds of other things, to say, "don't solve problems using violence," but, at the same time, we have this inertial

exposure that our children have, through the media, of solving problems with violence. we have these subtle ways, and not so subtle ways of solving problems in foreign policy, using violence. we have these models for solving problems, even in child rearing, we use violence. i shouldn't laugh about this, but i have seen many times, young parents, and older parents,

at the playground with their children. their little child will push another child, and they'll go over, intending to teach them, don't hit, and they'll swat the kid on the butt. and say don't hit. right? i mean we do things like that all the time, so what i'm telling you right now, is that we have the potential to be more intentional about what we pass on to the next generation,

and if we aren't more intentional about this, we are losing a tremendous oportunity, and, we're actually on quite a dangerous trajectory, and i'll talk about that in a second, because this interesting thing about social-cultural evolution, is that if you do not explicitly pass on something to the next generation, it goes away. you know, i remember my grandmother, and

she used to make cookies that were incredibly good, and we tried to replicate that recipe a million times, and it's because she had some secret, i don't know whether it was the oven, or whether she'd put msg in those cookies, or what, but she had some secret, that she didn't pass on to us, and we've lost forever, those miracle magical cookies. you know, we

get close approximations, but it's not the same thing. and everybody in this room has seen, in their own lives, in their own family, the loss of trans-generational things. it might be something as simple as a ritual around thanksgiving, or you know, a way, a practice you used to do around some holiday, that is going away. part of what's happened in this remarkable

process, is that there are limits to what social-cultural evolution can do. so, we can invent all kinds of stuff, and one of the things that's happened really, that's very challenging for the present, is that, over the last several decades, and maybe even longer, we have slowly been neglecting two of our most powerful biological gifts.

human beings have certain genetic gifts, bears have certain genetic gifts, eagles have certain genetic gifts, and whenever you create policy, practice, or law, that is in synchrony with your biology, you see remarkable things happen, but you can't fight biology very much. and part of what's happened is, in our inventing process, we have lost our way.

we have invented ourselves into environments that are relationally disrespectful, that are relationally impoverished, let me just talk about this for a second. i'll come to early childhood in a minute. these are obviously inter-related, but one of the most powerful things that we have going for us as a species, is our capacity to form and maintain relationships. human

beings, in the natural world, are slow, we don't have any natural body armor, we have no poisons that we can use, you know, we're not that fast, we are known to the other predators in the natural world as "meat on feet," a little prehistoric joke there, alright so, but the only way we've survived on the planet was by forming working groups, by literally creating a

larger functional whole, in fact, the lowest divisible unit of evolution for our species, isn't the person, it's the clan, it's the group. we are neurobiologically designed to live, work, play, die in groups. and in the natural condition in which human beings lived, for 99.9% of the time we've been on this planet, we've lived in multifamily, multi-generational groups. and in those

groups, we live together, the concept of private space was very odd, it didn't exist. there was more touch, more conversation, more eye contact, there was more relational interactions. in fact, if you were a child under the age of 6, and living in a typical hunter-gatherer clan, or later on, a typical multifamily group, the number of developmentally more mature individuals,

who would be present in your life, to help you grow up, to nurture, to model, to educate, to discipline, was four to one. we now think it's an incredibly enriched early childhood environment to have one teacher and eight kids. and it's not unusual to have one teacher and twenty kids. and as kids get a little older, one teacher and thirty kids. so we have an incredibly

relationally diluted model for parenting, for childcare, for education. and i'll talk about the consequences of that in a minute, but let's keep exploring this. so we've got fewer people in our lives, right? the average size of a household has been shrinking, in the last u.s. census, 1/3 of the households in the u.s. had one person. but if this is where we started, by 1500

in the west, we were down to about twenty, 1850: ten, and by the 2000 census we had fewer than three people in the typical american household, and the irony is, this is sort of coupled with this american dream of get your own home, get your own room in your own home. and then, get your own screen in your own room in your own home. and so, part of what's been happening is

that there's been this fragmentation of experience, that we spend less time with each other in human ways, and we spend a tremendous amount of time in front of a screen. the consequences of this are not fully understood, but one of the things that we know for sure, is this: that the relational landscape is changing. now, why does this

matter? this matters for a number of reasons, and this poverty of relationships is extremely important because the normal neurobiological networks that you have in your brain and your body, that help you regulate your physiology, your stress response networks, that control how well your pancreas works, and how vulnerable you may or may not be

to diabetes, how your heart works, how your lungs work, how your skin works, how your neuro-immune system works, and then, how every part of your brain works, the part of the brain involved in moving, the part of the brain involved in forming relationships, the part of the brain involved in empathy, in compassion, in creativity, in productivity, every single part of the brain, and all

the rest of your body, are influenced by relational interactions. your stress response systems and the neuro-biological networks that you have that are involved in reward, and the systems that give you pleasure, are co-organized with the neuro-biological networks that are involved in forming and maintaining relationships, and the mechanism by which

this takes place is the early developmental experience you have with your primary caregiver, typically your mother. so human beings have wonderful sensory apparatus, we have eyes, we have ears, we have the sensation of touch, and one of the things that happens is, these external sensory apparatus that you're using right now to hear me, and to see these images,

these sensory apparatus connect you one to another. and your senses turn these experiences, visual input, auditory input, tactile input into patterned neuronal activity, that goes up into your brain, and sends a variety of signals, a cascade of neural activity that influences how you develop. and so, this is important, because in the

little alien baby here, they have an undeveloped brain, their capacity for language is yet to develop, their capacity for forming relationships has yet to develop, their capacity to use their fingers to play a piano, or manipulate a joystick, is yet to develop, and it is waiting for experience. your brain, and the neural networks you have in your brain,

develop in a use-dependent way, your brain has, literally, 84 billion neurons, and neuron has, probably, 200 to 2000 synaptic connections, and each one of those synapse is firing at a rate of about 80 times per minute, and that incredible complexity creates networks of activity, neural networks of activity, that somehow, make us who we are. but one thing that

we know, is that these neural networks develop as a function of repetition, and what you'll see here, is the creation of a synaptic connection, this is a plate of neurons, and this, oh by the way, this is me when i had brown hair. i'm just saying, you know, i used to really look young. so this is a plate of neurons, and...

that's not a plate of neurons... this is a plate of neurons, and what i'm gonna show you is the creation of a synaptic connection, and so, when you were an infant, in the first year of life, you create billions and billions and billions of these synaptic connections as a function of your experiences and.... pretty cool, right?

now think about this, this is a very powerful thing. who is that, is that me? i don't know why that's happening. anyway, let's ignore that man behind the curtain. so, let me talk about this for a second, let me stop this, right...here. now, let's pretend, now you all know, you all learned this in elementary school, you

learn that, your eyeball turns photons into patterned neural activity, goes up into your brain, and you learned that your eardrum, and those three little bones, turn sound waves into neural activity that goes up into your brain, and right now, you're hearing this, and you're thinking about this, and you're realizing, i know, oh, sensory information comes in separate,

and in order to make a connection between an image and a sound, in other words, in order to create language, i have to connect sound and image. and what you're doing is, making, literally, making the physical concrete connections that you saw created here. so let's pretend, that this is the patterned neural activity that occurs when you see a dog, and this is the patterned

neural activity that occurs when you hear the sound, 'dog.' and up until this point you're about to see, the sound, 'dog,' was just a sound, and it becomes, actually, a word, once this connection is created. and your brain is doing this currently, right now, you're making synaptic connections, but the rate at which you're making synaptic connections now, is nothing

compared to the rate at which you were making them in the first few years of life. in fact, over 90% of the existing synaptic connections in your brain right now, were created as a function of your experiences in the first three or four years of life. they create your internal architecture, your view of the world. and this happens in a use-dependent way, so if you're a

little child in and you're in a highly verbal environment, and you hear lots of words and conversation, you are going to, by age 2, develop a vocabulary... did i say a highly verbal? that would be this one. if you have a highly verbal early environment, by the time you're two years old, you've got a vocabulary of 600 words. if you've got a low verbal environment

you're vocabulary is only 150 to 200 words. the nature of your cognitive experiences with language influence how you develop. now, there are differences in the way we're exposed to words, there's differences in the way we're exposed to language, there's differences in the way we're exposed to motor exploration, there's differences in the way we're exposed to relationships.

and so the speech and language parts of your brain develop as a function of the words you hear. and the parts of your brain involved in forming and maintaining healthy relationships also develop as a function of the relational interactions you have, so if you're a child who grows up in an environment where there's a lot of people in your life, who

are attentive and attuned to you, you get lots of social repetitions, and, this is a single contact, a single day, in the life of a typical child, this is from a real child, this is six in the morning, this is noon, this is six at night, and this is midnight. the inner circle is positive relational interactions with somebody in the family, these are positive interactions

with peers, with friends, this is with peers, like classmates, and this is with strangers. and this child, all day long, has repetition, repetition, repetition, repetition with relational interactions, and that has multiple effects. one is, that it is rewarding, and as most of you know, when you have a positive interaction with somebody, who you admire, trust, respect,

like, it's rewarding, it's pleasurable. the second effect is that it also is regulating, so, in the presence of safe and familiar individuals, your stress response systems are quieter, you have a lower resting heart rate, if somebody smiles at you, literally there's parts of your brain that release hormones that keep you young, if somebody touches you, in

the right way, you know, it's not poking your chest, but if somebody touches you, in an embracing, affectionate way, it is a neuro-physiological event. it's physiologically regulating, it's good for your heart, good for your skin, good for your gut, it makes you healthy. many, many, many of you have been reading the studies, or reading in the papers

about the fact that if you are in a socially isolated situation, you'll die earlier, if you're in a socially isolated situation, higher rates of heart disease, social isolation, all kinds of physical health problems, and mental health problems. so, this is a healthy child, with a relationally enriched environment, and this is a child in foster care. this is

the best day that he had, and so, this child has significant poverty of relationship and poverty of reward. if you have poverty of reward, you're much more likely to use other ways to get your rewards met, other ways to regulate, and some of the ways these kids use to regulate, is,"wow, i'm disregulated, lemme smoke a joint," "i'm disregulated, lemme drink a little bit,"

"i'm not getting any reward? lemme take some cocaine." "i'm not getting my reward? lemme eat sweet, salty, and fatty foods." so there are... you increase the probabilities that someone will utilize maladaptive, or unhealthy forms of regulation and reward, by having poverty of relationships. in turn, if you have a healthy relational environment, your ability to resist unhealthy

forms of regulation and reward is so much better. so, the relational significance, relational neuro-biology and it's interconnection between the stress response system and the reward system is absolutely essential to understanding public health issues like obesity. absolutely essential to understanding and interpreting the adverse childhood

experience work, where we know that the more adversity you have when you're young, the more likely you are to have mental health problems, physical health problems, substance abuse, and in turn, even if you have adversity, if you have relational health, those effects can be buffered. they're protective, because adversity is all around us, everybody is going to have

adversity. if you have adversity in the presence of safe and stable relationships, you end up with having fewer long term health, mental health, social consequences. if you have minimal adversity, and relational poverty, you end up being very, very, very at risk. this is something that makes me say, that it is as important for us to think intentionally and deliberately

about creating social-emotional, relationally enriched curriculum, as it is to develop curriculum around science, math, engineering, in fact, i would argue that it's more essential that we develop intentional opportunities for relational enrichment in the lives of our children, in order to express this potential, because of what's been happening in the last several decades.

the last several decades, as we have invented the present, with the onset of screen time, with the onset of mobility in communities, with the onset of acquisition of private living spaces. you know, it's an interesting thing, i like my house, but it is isolating, and it is apart, i live away from my family, my extended family, i live away from my neighbors.

there's a cost to the choices we've made about the way we have created our lives, and one of the costs is, all parts of the brain develop in a use-dependent way, and if you raise a child, and i'm not talking about in an abusive environment, but you raise a child in a typical american environment, and they watch television, the typical number of hours american kids

watch, and they have a cell phone, and screen time, the way a typical american kid has, they will end up, at age 15, having had the same number of social- emotional learning opportunities, that three decades before, would have been typical for a child who is 6. in other words, we've got 18 year old kids, who have the cognitive skills of 18 year olds,

but they have the social-emotional skills of 6 year olds. they're more self centered, they're more self-absorbed, why do you think these kids are taking photo after photo, after photo, after photo of themselves and posting it online? i mean, seriously, they are so self-absorbed that they think i give two shits about what they had for lunch. excuse my language,

but they photograph, "oh, i had this for lunch!" tweet it, okay, awesome. i don't care... now, there are many, many, many, many manifestations of this problem, one of them is a study that was looking at the mmpi, now many of you don't know what that is, but the mmpi is a test you can take, that sort of looks at various aspects

of personality. and in the last birth-cohorts, in 2007, there were 5 times as many individuals who scored above the cutoff for psychopathy. now this is a normal population, so in comparison to 1938, in 2007, in the general population, there were 5 times as many individuals who met criteria, for what used to be considered: psychopath.

and the interpretation of these authors are that, the culture has shifted away from intrinsic goals, such as community, meaning in life, and affiliation, and more towards extrinsic goals, such as materialism, status, etc. another study, there's again, there's a standard test that people have been administering for many many years, and it

measures empathy, and different aspects of empathy, and they noted: significantly, empathic subscales dropping significantly, particularly around perspective taking, which is a more developmentally mature capability, in other words, basically what they're saying is, that we've got a bunch of 18 year old, 19 year old, 20 year old college students who have the empathic

capabilities of children who are much younger. it's like language, right? if you hear half as many words, you're gonna have a vocabulary that's half as developed. we are raising children who are literally, coming of age with good cognitive skills, but very very poor social-emotional skills, and this is really important for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is,

the fact that we live in a representative democracy. what is one of the most powerful indicators of investment in community and being other-oriented than voting? look at this, this is in the election when you would have thought the youth would have been energized, this is when obama was first elected, and the lowest percentage of voters were the young people. this is

in the last election, how can you have a representative democracy, when people are disengaging from the electoral process? again, this is a reflection, i believe, of this undeveloped social-emotional potential, and it's why we need to start thinking more deliberately about creating environments that can help express that potential in individuals.

again, if you go and you look at, and do surveys of people in the corporate world, and you look at what they're seeking in new employees, new hires, and this is from a survey in st. louis in 2013, and they went to all these people that are hiring, and they said, "what are the major deficits you're finding in the people that are in the job market, and the young people

coming out of school?" none of these, and i know you can't read this very well, because it's sort of, sort of a bad slide, but basically, down here is all the hard skills, you know, the stem things that we're all concerned about in education that we have to teach towards, well, they don't care about that as much, all of this stuff is just soft skills.

these are things like, they're not effective in groups, they don't know how to communicate, they don't have fundamental interpersonal skills, and i have heard story after story about, from people in the corporate sector, about the challenge they're having in getting relationally appropriate young individuals. now, they're bright, and they have some skills, but they do things

like pull out their cellphone in the middle of a job interview, seriously, and tell the head of a fortune 500 company, to, "excuse me a moment," in a job interview, "i've got to respond to this tweet." that's...i'm not kidding, that's real story. the parts of our brain that are involved in becoming humane develop just like every other part of our brain, as a function

our raw potential, and i can guarantee you almost everybody is born with the raw potential to have fundamental relational skills, because it is at the core of being a successful human being. and there would be the very, very, very, very, very, very rare genetic abnormality that would be such that you would not be able to have fundamental relational skills, now it does

exist, but it's very rare. so the vast majority of us are born with the capacity to be humane, and empathic, and compassionate, but that capability will only be expressed if we have experiences with other human beings. (child in audience," uh oh!") uh oh? awesome! that was awesome! give that little child a cigar! a play cigar, mind you.

that is exactly what i wanted to say, "uhoh!" now, and again, i don't want people to think that i'm saying that all screen time, or, all that stuff is bad, in fact i think that once we learn how to master these tools, they will be the mechanisms by which we will most quickly transform these problems. however, we are not yet masters of these tools, they are our masters.

everybody in this room has been pulled away from a positive human interaction by being distracted by a television in the background, or a buzz when their phone rang, or, "excuse me," and i have been out to eat, as have all of you, and looked over and seen people having a 'family meal,' when everybody, mom is on her phone, dad is on his phone, and the kids are on

their ipads. we've all seen this, and maybe all of us have done this a little bit, and part of what we have to do, and this is why i talk about this, we have to intentionally model a different way of being, we have to intentionally create, in our classrooms, curriculum about regulating the use of these tools. i mean, we've learned how to regulate the use of

a car, right? we teach kids how to use certain things. you know, when you're a little boy scout, and you're learning how to carve and whittle, there are certain things, you learn how to actually do things with that tool. we have not developed adequate structure, and, if you will, screen time hygiene, for ourselves, for the workplace, or for our children. and

that's something that we have to do. now, how much, i forget, where am i? 15 minutes, alright, so, i talked for a minute, actually quite a few minutes, about the one area where we've been developmentally respec- disrespectful, we've really, we've created and invented, not intentionally, but we've invented ourselves away from our relational needs, and it's playing a role in many,

many, many of our problems. the other area where we've been broadly disrespectful, is underestimating the power of early childhood, and the reason i think it's important for us to be aware of this, is that the set of problems i just described, will be most easily remedied by addressing early childhood relational environments. and the reason i say that, is that, so much

of the fundamental biological capability, and neuro-biological growth, of the individual takes place early in life. so if you look at physical growth of the brain, it plateaus when you're four and five. now that doesn't mean you stop developing, many, many, many important developmental things happen, but the fundamental architectural growth of your brain slows

down tremendously. there's periods in the third trimester when you're making 20 thousand brand new neurons per second. now you're making new neurons today, but you'll be lucky if you make three or four hundred. no, seriously, that's a good day. for me, you know, i'm happy to get 50. but so the rate slows down, and again, we're malleable, human beings continue to

be malleable, changeable, but the fact is, we have this incredible gift early in life when we are most responsive to experiences, both good and bad. let me start with the bad. this is, some of you may have heard about this, but if you look at a bunch of adults, and you line them up, and you say, "alright, i want to know about your physical health, about your mental health, about your

academic productivity, i want to look at all these different aspects of your life. did you go to jail? do you take drugs? do you have good relationships? are you suicidal?" literally, list all kinds of stuff. an then, "i want to look at your history, your developmental history. did you have adverse experiences? did you have developmental trauma? child abuse? neglect?

exposure to, you know, combat? you know, did you have things as you were growing up, that were overwhelming, that were stress activating, in an unpredictable and prolonged way? in other words, did you have developmental trauma?" and if you did, here's what happens: the more adversity you have when you're young, the more of these adverse childhood experiences you have, the more at risk you

are for expressing problems in physical health domains and mental health domains, and social domains. so over here, when this morbidity, basically what they're talking about is, do you have heart disease, do you have mental illness, do you have substance abuse problems, have you had a suicide attempt, did you drop out of school? and so the more adversity you

have, in this linear way, the more bad things happen, the more comprise there is in your development, then the more vulnerable you are. now, these early... it's interesting that, many of you know about, we've had big public health campaigns about the fact that if you smoke, it's bad for your lungs, and if you smoke, you're gonna be at risk for heart disease, and

if you smoke, all these bad things will happen. drink alcohol, you can get cirrhosis. if you drink alcohol when you're pregnant, that can cause fetal alcohol syndrome, and all kinds of stuff. but did you know that your risk for having a heart attack is greater, if you have three adverse childhood experiences than if you smoked two packs of cigarettes a day?

so, developmental adversity is a power- ful determinate of health in multiple domains. health, and global wellness. now, so this is an important thing, turns out, that this curve actually needs to be modified a little bit. if you think, if you remember what i said about how important relationships are, and how they have the potential to regulate you,

if you have an adverse experience, and you are in a relationally healthy environment, rather than having the curve look like this, the curve actually looks like this. in other words, you can no compromise, and have significant adversity, if you have relational health. and if you have relational poverty, it actually looks like this. you actually, relational poverty, in and

of itself, even without overt adversity, leads to increased risk for heart disease, mental health problems, and so forth. and this is a different way of saying this. this right here, is, and again, i don't want to use too much data, but, get the gestalt feeling that, the more this goes up here, the more this goes down. in other words, these are bad things here,

this is how healthy the brain is, and the more bad things, the less healthy your brain is. but, if you look at the very same children, and then plot the same data, what you find is, but relational health can protect you. the more relational health you have, the more you are basically develop normal brain functional capability. and you can see this with, all, we've seen

this with all different age groups, adversity makes you vulnerable, relationships protect you. and this, of course, if you then think about the fact that it's almost impossible to avoid adversity in your life, it makes it all the more important to start thinking about deliberate creation of relational health. how do we think about how our neighborhoods are constructed?

how do we think about the way we build even our own homes? how do we think about the fact that, oh gee, even though i've got a lot of money, and i could have a separate room for both of my kids, i want them to share a room. or, how about i take a tv out of their room? and if we're gonna watch tv, we're at least going to be in the same space. how about if we

actually have more family meals? how about if we do all kinds of little structural things to increase the number and quality of relational interactions, you are literally buffering your children from the inevitable adversity that they will be experiencing. they will be better regulated, they'll be better capable of learning, they'll be better capable of

sharing, and they'll be better capable of creating. one of the things that we know, is this, again, the early developmental experiences are disproportionately powerful, early developmental bad, and early developmental good. so this, again, i don't want you to read all this, unless you're really bored. but you might want to look at this at some

point if you're sort of academically inclined, bottom line is this: this is from a study where, a bunch of children were given very high quality early childhood programming, and it lasted for about two years. and so, when they were really little, and these were kids that came from pretty high risk environments, they gave them really high quality early childhood

programming, and it cost money, you know, it costs a little bit of money, not a ton of money, but it cost some money. and then, they went off into the world, and they grew up, now people tracked their emotional and cognitive outcomes, and they were better, as they got into childhood and... but this study actually went back to these kids now that they're adults, and looked

at physical health factors, and they found that, that brief social-emotional early childhood focused environment, that was relationally enriched, literally had enduring physical health consequences, that were powerful and positive. and again, this speaks to the power of early childhood. and yet, both in the way we value, the way we invest in early childhood, and the

way we create relational environments, we are being disrespectful to our own biology. this is the number of relational opportunities in a hunter-gatherer clan for a child in that world, a primitive world, right? oh, we call that primitive, and here is a modern kid, who's got a single caregiver and goes to a childcare environment where the ratio is 1:4, which is almost

unrealistic. and even under those circumstances, this child has 1/20th the social-emotional learning opportunities that this child has. the question is, are you going to help change that? because if you don't, if you, the people who literally got up, on a saturday morning, one of the most beautiful days of the year, and came to listen to me talk about this,

if you're not gonna do it, who in the hell is gonna do this? seriously. we have to do this, we have to be intentional about this, we have to recognize that we have the power to make changes, small and big, both in policy and our own lives, that will ultimately help us depart from this trajectory, because this is a trans- generational deterioration.

think about it, we've got, you know, the statistics about the number of isolated, overwhelmed families now, compared to two decades ago, is stunning. it's hard to raise kids, let alone raising them on your own, let alone raising them away from your parents and your aunties and your cousins. so because we are a mobile culture, it's not unusual to have a single isolated

caregiver have responsibility for multiple children at once, and have nobody who knows her in the neighborhood, nobody who, she's not connected to a community of faith, she's not connected to her extended family, and that is a disaster. this mother may be well-intended, she may be hard working, she may be the...you know, mother teresa, could not do the right thing by those

children, honestly. we have to change this. this is the return on investment curve that james heckman, a nobel laureate from chicago, developed a number of years ago, and it basically shows you, again, that if you invest in these early programs, if you do something that's resonant with our biology, we're most malleable early in life,

let's invest in that time in life, you get a huge bang for your buck, but this is a curve i made in 1996, that basically shows the malleability of the brain, here's the malleability of the brain, it changes, but it's easiest to change here, and this shows you how we spend money to change the brain in our culture. this mismatch between potential and opportunity is, really, a

disaster, and if we can act on this mismatch, we can change the world, we literally can see a quantum leap in the productivity, the creativity, and the humanity of our species, and i can tell you right now, when you start to look at things like, the number of people on this planet, we're gonna have to learn how to live together, right? think about it, how

many people are on this planet? a lot. i don't have it in here, i can't find the slide quickly, but here's the bottom line: our children are going to be living in an increasingly diverse world, with increasingly limited resources, and it is not going to help our species, if the people who are in that circumstance don't know how to share and communicate, and

respect others. but if we do, we can survive as a species, if we don't, it doesn't matter how much math we know, really, we need people who can do both. and there's no reason why we can't invent a future that helps fully express the potential of children to do both. so, i will stop with that, maybe, i have no idea if i left time enough for questions,

5 minutes for questions? that's better than usual, so, thank you for your attention. thank you! questions? questions, comments, hopes, dreams, dirty limericks, i'm open for anything. yes, there's a question over there. i was in a household, about, a couple

days ago, for dinner, and they an 18 month old child, and he was using one of these digital devices that read to him, and he knew how to push the buttons to change the programs, but all that he's experiencing is what the digital device shows him, i kinda threw it out, i took a book, and started reading to him. i'd say touch this, and looking at the words, pointing out

words. and do you have any idea how that will be transformative because, this is happening everywhere. you go to a restaurant, and you can see little children all on their devices while the parents are talking, either talking or on their devices. well, you know, your observation is something that all of us have seen. i have three grandchildren, two of them are two

year olds, and every once in awhile, there'll be this developmental tv programming that their parents will put on, and so there literally are, on television, programs that a little dancing, sort of looks like an iphone thing that dances around, and he calls himself, your first friend. i will be your first friend. and literally, it's nauseating, but it permeates that

kind of thinking. i remember when i was asked to give the presentation about early childhood, about brain development to the, all of the pbs affiliates, and it was a national pbs convention, and i got up, and you know, it was sort of a bait and switch, i actually gave a talk about why television is bad for children. they didn't ask me back, i don't know why.

so, one of the people afterwards, came up and said, "well i just want you to understand, that we're developing programming so that the mother and the child will sit down, and sit together, they'll be together, and they'll watch the show together, and like a really colorful a that comes, and an apple, and so," and all this stuff. and i said, "well okay, well the intention is

you're expecting the parent to be there with the child, right? well then, why don't you just tell them to turn off the tv, and have mom turn and face the child, and go 'a, b...'" okay, and they didn't like that very much, but that's happening. now, with that said, let me also say, i don't want to vilify all of this, because you can, if you can, i'm a big fan of

moderation, and i'm a big fan of technology. if you learn how to use these things with discipline, then rather than having your brain shaped by them, you can use them in ways that are appropriate and enriching. so, i think part of what we're gonna have to do, is sort of, as a broader culture, figure this stuff out, but it's going to take awhile, because the rate

of change is so much faster than our rate of problem solving, and we're always behind the curve, by the time we think we've figured out, it literally took the american academy of pediatrics up until about 3 or 4 years ago, to finally make a statement, that children under the age of 3, shouldn't watch television all the time. and so, if it took that long, television

was introduced in the 50's, so it's gonna take a long time for them to develop a consensus statement about, you know, the use of texting as a form of dating. have you ever seen, do you guys know who mike leach is? any football fans in the crowd? mike leach is a football coach, notorious for being sort of, a little bizarre. those of you who use the web, go online, and

type in; mike leach- end of the world. and he's doing this post-game interview about something, and he starts talking about dating, and soon it's gonna be two people on a thing, "hi, what's your name?" it's one of the funniest parodies of what could happen, based upon this electronic stuff. we are in a rapidly changing world, and i'm very very very concerned about the

inertial progress of what we're doing, and the way it's getting passed to the next generations. and that's why i think we need to be more deliberate about it, we need to think more about it, but i don't think we need to destroy all these things and then move back to caves. some people, after they hear me talk, they're like,"well he just thinks the modern world sucks."

and i'm like, "no, i don't." i just think we need to learn how to capture, or recapture, the parts of our past, that were healthy, and incorporate these new technologies, but i don't know exactly how to do that. (inaudible) yeah, i.. there's a couple of things, the question is: how can you learn maybe

a little bit more about these things? there's a couple of things, i've listed a couple of websites here, i actually wrote a book that's kind of about this, it's called "born for love" and the truth is, i don't recommend that book, i mean it's... how do i say this? i mean i like, i think the content is good, i don't think it's as well-written as other things i've written.

it's too...i had a big fight with the co-author. my first book, it was all about stories, and i thought, and it was interesting, the second book, she wanted it to more like a regular book, so it's like regular book, but it's got some of this stuff in there. yes? recently, i saw on facebook that you said that adhd is not a real disease, can you

comment on that? well, yeah, i can. that was so interesting, first of all, that is a complete distortion of what i said, and it happened after an interview with a reporter in england, and the british press are notorious for, i don't know if you know this, but they're notorious for basically wanting to cause sensation whenever they can, so i had this

hour long interview with this guy, and then at the end, he's like,"well what's going on, what's interesting in the field, and what about all this adhd?" and i said, "well, you know, what you need to understand is that adhd is essentially a description of symptoms, and in the conventional sense of a patho-physiology that we know leads to a certain set of symptoms, that's not

the way the dsm-5 works. the dsm-5 is about descriptions, but it's not connected to physiology, so in that sense, it's not like a real disease. and so, all of the sudden, people are saying, "he doesn't believe that adhd exists, and you know," i even got hate-mail from parents, "my kid has adhd!" and i'm like, i didn't say there aren't inattentive children. but adhd, as a

distinct disease, is not a disease. it's a description, and that's the way the dsm-5 is constructed. so, if you are inattentive, you are a little impulsive, and you have a few other things, you meet criterian for that label. but in terms of, it's different from diseases, in other areas of medicine. so let me give you an example: if you walk into the doctor's office and you have

chest pain, you don't have "chest pain disease." right? you have, maybe, heartburn, that's caused by your gi system. you might have pleurisy, caused by something in your lungs, you might have a pancreatitis, caused by your panreas. you might be having a heart attack. so there's four different diseases, or disease processes, that could be causing that symptom. and so, that's the

dilemma we have in mental health right now. and in fact, the nimh is moving away from using the dsm-5, and moving to a much more descriptive set of, if you will, diagnostic labeling, in order to actually start to connect real, physiological processes to disease clusters. that's kinda what i was trying to talk to him about, and he took that one thing and

distorted it, and went to the races and.. i got all kinds of hate mail.