Sashiko: A Stitchery Of Japan

The term sashiko refers to the stitching of one or more layers of cloth with a simple running stitch and can also apply to the completed fabric. Sashiko is the noun of the verb sasu, meaning to pierce. Sashiko probably was initially a way to recycle or extend the life of cloth. Among the textiles in the Shoso-in, the Imperial Repository built circa 752 to preserve thousands of objects of art and other belongings of the Emperor Shomu, is an 8th Century distant mountain pattern monk\u27s robe covered with a purple silk running stitch. This running stitch is superfluous to the actual structure of the robe. This is a development of an earlier ritual robe, evolved to the point where the stitches have lost their original function to strengthen and attach the patches of cloth, but retained to give the appearance of the original robe of rags. This is the oldest example of sashiko extant in Japan. There is a gap in recorded history from this point until the 17th Century when other sashiko are mentioned. Sashiko was done throughout Japan, primarily by women. It is not known to have been done commercially with the possible exception of some of the firemen clothing. Often it was done by and for people who were too poor to buy new cloth. Sashiko developed from necessity rather than as a luxury, so the art of sashiko wasn\u27t highly competitive, with some exceptions. That is, the product was not regarded as a statement of fashion. Originally a practical technique for making cloth thicker, warmer, and more durable, sashiko can also be purely decorative. Clothing that has been over stitched is not only very strong, but warm. Therefore, it was reasonable to reinforce the cloth by stitching before the cloth wore out. Presently it is done on new cloth, for garments and textiles to be sold in folk craft shops. Typically, sashiko stitching is done with white cotton thread on an indigo-dyed fabric. Most sashiko uses one strand of thread through the needle, doubled so that both strands account for the stitch although it can be done with a single strand. The length of the stitch varies with the number of layers being stitched together. Keeping the stitches even in length, as well as straight, requires skill and practise. There are approximately five to ten stitches per inch (five to ten stitches per 2.5 cm.) with certain districts noted for having particularly fine stitching. Sashiko was done on balanced weave textiles, that is the warp and weft are the same thickness and weight of thread. Although the ground fabric threads were not usually counted, the stitches were. Within a pattern, per line, the same number and length of stitch is held constant and is consistent (from point A to B are always x number of stitches and the length of each stitch is held constant). Many patterns consist of straight lines that intersect at right angles, so counting the stitches made the patterns quite exact. At the point of intersection either the stitching threads cross creating a pattern, or the absence of the threads create a pattern such as a star or the center of a flower. Sashiko can be either a single repeating pattern or a combination of several patterns on one fabric

Sashiko: A Stitchery Of Japan

The term sashiko refers to the stitching of one or more layers of cloth with a simple running stitch and can also apply to the completed fabric. Sashiko is the noun of the verb sasu, meaning to pierce. Sashiko probably was initially a way to recycle or extend the life of cloth. Among the textiles in the Shoso-in, the Imperial Repository built circa 752 to preserve thousands of objects of art and other belongings of the Emperor Shomu, is an 8th Century distant mountain pattern monk\u27s robe covered with a purple silk running stitch. This running stitch is superfluous to the actual structure of the robe. This is a development of an earlier ritual robe, evolved to the point where the stitches have lost their original function to strengthen and attach the patches of cloth, but retained to give the appearance of the original robe of rags. This is the oldest example of sashiko extant in Japan. There is a gap in recorded history from this point until the 17th Century when other sashiko are mentioned. Sashiko was done throughout Japan, primarily by women. It is not known to have been done commercially with the possible exception of some of the firemen clothing. Often it was done by and for people who were too poor to buy new cloth. Sashiko developed from necessity rather than as a luxury, so the art of sashiko wasn\u27t highly competitive, with some exceptions. That is, the product was not regarded as a statement of fashion. Originally a practical technique for making cloth thicker, warmer, and more durable, sashiko can also be purely decorative. Clothing that has been over stitched is not only very strong, but warm. Therefore, it was reasonable to reinforce the cloth by stitching before the cloth wore out. Presently it is done on new cloth, for garments and textiles to be sold in folk craft shops. Typically, sashiko stitching is done with white cotton thread on an indigo-dyed fabric. Most sashiko uses one strand of thread through the needle, doubled so that both strands account for the stitch although it can be done with a single strand. The length of the stitch varies with the number of layers being stitched together. Keeping the stitches even in length, as well as straight, requires skill and practise. There are approximately five to ten stitches per inch (five to ten stitches per 2.5 cm.) with certain districts noted for having particularly fine stitching. Sashiko was done on balanced weave textiles, that is the warp and weft are the same thickness and weight of thread. Although the ground fabric threads were not usually counted, the stitches were. Within a pattern, per line, the same number and length of stitch is held constant and is consistent (from point A to B are always x number of stitches and the length of each stitch is held constant). Many patterns consist of straight lines that intersect at right angles, so counting the stitches made the patterns quite exact. At the point of intersection either the stitching threads cross creating a pattern, or the absence of the threads create a pattern such as a star or the center of a flower. Sashiko can be either a single repeating pattern or a combination of several patterns on one fabric

Ozone and the deterioration of works of art

Seventeen artists' watercolor pigment samples and two Japanese woodblock prints were exposed to 0.40 ppm ozone in a controlled test chamber for three months. It was found that several artists' pigments when applied on paper will fade in the absence of light if exposed to an atmosphere containing ozone at the concentrations found in photochemical smog. Alizarin-based watercolors containing 1,2 dihydroxyanthraquinone lake pigments were shown to be particularly sensitive to ozone damage, as were the yellow pigments used in the Japanese woodblock prints tested. Indoor-outdoor ozone monitoring in a Pasadena, CA art gallery confirmed that ozone concentrations half as high as those outdoors can be found in art galleries that lack a chemically protected air conditioning system. Care should be taken to protect works of art from damage due to photochemical smog

Kemp\u27s Ridley Sea Turtle (Lepidochelys kempii) Nesting on the Texas Coast: Geographic, Temporal, and Demographic Trends Through 2014

Kemp’s ridley (Lepidochelys kempii) is the world’s most endangered sea turtle species, and nests primarily on the Gulf of Mexico coast in Mexico. In 1978, a binational project was initiated to form a secondary nesting colony of this species in south Texas at Padre Island National Seashore (PAIS), as a safeguard against extinction. During 1978–2014, we documented 1,667 Kemp’s ridley nests in Texas, with 56% found at PAIS. Most nests (89%) found in south Texas were from wild-stock turtles; south Texas is the northern extent of the documented historic nesting range for the species. We documented nesting in north Texas starting in 2002, and most nests (53%) found there were from turtles that had been head-started (reared in captivity for 9–11 mo), and released off the Texas coast as yearlings. Kemp’s ridley nesting increased in Texas during the mid-1990s through 2009, before annual nest numbers dropped in 2010, rebounded and plateaued in 2011 and 2012, and then decreased again in 2013 and 2014. Annual numbers of nests found in Texas and Mexico followed similar trends and were correlated (R2 = 0.95). We examined nesting turtles for presence of tags at 55% of the nests located in Texas. Of the Kemp’s ridleys we examined during 2000–14, the annual percentage of apparent neophytes decreased and the annual percentage of remigrants increased over time. Mean annual remigration intervals of Kemp’s ridleys increased steadily from 1.9 yr in 2008 to 3.3 yr in 2014. These changes in demographic parameters are critical to understanding the recent fluctuation in the number of nesting Kemps ridleys and will be used in population models to investigate possible causes of the recent and sudden decline of nesting Kemp’s ridleys in Texas and Mexico

Discourses Surrounding Academic Language: Conceptual Hurdles Moving from Theory to Practice in Teacher Education

This presentation explored qualitative and quantitative research on current perceptions of academic language among Cedarville education students, education faculty, and area high school teachers

Home site advantage in two long-lived arctic plant species : results from two 30-year reciprocal transplant studies

Author Posting. © The Author(s), 2012. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of John Wiley & Sons for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Journal of Ecology 100 (2012): 841-851, doi:10.1111/j.1365-2745.2012.01984.x.Reciprocal transplant experiments designed to quantify genetic and environmental effects on phenotype are powerful tools for the study of local adaptation. For long-lived species, especially those in habitats with short growing seasons, however, the cumulative effects of many years in novel environments may be required for fitness differences and phenotypic changes to accrue. We returned to two separate reciprocal transplant experiments thirty years after their initial establishment in interior Alaska to ask whether patterns of differentiation observed in the years immediately following transplant have persisted. We also asked whether earlier hypotheses about the role of plasticity in buffering against the effects of selection on foreign genotypes were supported. We censused survival and flowering in three transplant gardens created along a snowbank gradient for a dwarf shrub (Dryas octopetala) and six gardens created along a latitudinal gradient for a tussock-forming sedge (Eriophorum vaginatum). For both species, we used an analysis of variance to detect fitness advantages for plants transplanted back into their home site relative to those transplanted into foreign sites. For D. octopetala, the original patterns of local adaptation observed in the decade following transplant appeared even stronger after three decades, with the complete elimination of foreign ecotypes in both fellfield and snowbed environments. For E. vaginatum, differential survival of populations was not evident 13 years after transplant, but was clearly evident 17 years later. There was no evidence that plasticity was associated with increased survival of foreign populations in novel sites for either D. octopetala or E. vaginatum. Synthesis. We conclude that local adaptation can be strong, but nevertheless remain undetected or underestimated in short-term experiments. Such genetically-based population differences limit the ability of plant populations to respond to a changing climate.Funding for this research was provided by National Science Foundation grant ARC-0908936 with additional support from NSF-BSR-9024188

Flap Endonuclease 1 Endonucleolytically Processes RNA to Resolve R-Loops through DNA Base Excision Repair.

Flap endonuclease 1 (FEN1) is an essential enzyme that removes RNA primers and base lesions during DNA lagging strand maturation and long-patch base excision repair (BER). It plays a crucial role in maintaining genome stability and integrity. FEN1 is also implicated in RNA processing and biogenesis. A recent study from our group has shown that FEN1 is involved in trinucleotide repeat deletion by processing the RNA strand in R-loops through BER, further suggesting that the enzyme can modulate genome stability by facilitating the resolution of R-loops. However, it remains unknown how FEN1 can process RNA to resolve an R-loop. In this study, we examined the FEN1 cleavage activity on the RNA:DNA hybrid intermediates generated during DNA lagging strand processing and BER in R-loops. We found that both human and yeast FEN1 efficiently cleaved an RNA flap in the intermediates using its endonuclease activity. We further demonstrated that FEN1 was recruited to R-loops in normal human fibroblasts and senataxin-deficient (AOA2) fibroblasts, and its R-loop recruitment was significantly increased by oxidative DNA damage. We showed that FEN1 specifically employed its endonucleolytic cleavage activity to remove the RNA strand in an R-loop during BER. We found that FEN1 coordinated its DNA and RNA endonucleolytic cleavage activity with the 3'-5' exonuclease of APE1 to resolve the R-loop. Our results further suggest that FEN1 employed its unique tracking mechanism to endonucleolytically cleave the RNA strand in an R-loop by coordinating with other BER enzymes and cofactors during BER. Our study provides the first evidence that FEN1 endonucleolytic cleavage can result in the resolution of R-loops via the BER pathway, thereby maintaining genome integrity

Flap Endonuclease 1 Endonucleolytically Processes RNA to Resolve R-Loops through DNA Base Excision Repair

Flap endonuclease 1 (FEN1) is an essential enzyme that removes RNA primers and base lesions during DNA lagging strand maturation and long-patch base excision repair (BER). It plays a crucial role in maintaining genome stability and integrity. FEN1 is also implicated in RNA processing and biogenesis. A recent study from our group has shown that FEN1 is involved in trinucleotide repeat deletion by processing the RNA strand in R-loops through BER, further suggesting that the enzyme can modulate genome stability by facilitating the resolution of R-loops. However, it remains unknown how FEN1 can process RNA to resolve an R-loop. In this study, we examined the FEN1 cleavage activity on the RNA:DNA hybrid intermediates generated during DNA lagging strand processing and BER in R-loops. We found that both human and yeast FEN1 efficiently cleaved an RNA flap in the intermediates using its endonuclease activity. We further demonstrated that FEN1 was recruited to R-loops in normal human fibroblasts and senataxin-deficient (AOA2) fibroblasts, and its R-loop recruitment was significantly increased by oxidative DNA damage. We showed that FEN1 specifically employed its endonucleolytic cleavage activity to remove the RNA strand in an R-loop during BER. We found that FEN1 coordinated its DNA and RNA endonucleolytic cleavage activity with the 3′-5′ exonuclease of APE1 to resolve the R-loop. Our results further suggest that FEN1 employed its unique tracking mechanism to endonucleolytically cleave the RNA strand in an R-loop by coordinating with other BER enzymes and cofactors during BER. Our study provides the first evidence that FEN1 endonucleolytic cleavage can result in the resolution of R-loops via the BER pathway, thereby maintaining genome integrity