Your Cart is Empty
They're here! The fabulous 13,230 Digits of Pi dresses and shirts have arrived!
Read about how we created the new collection!
I had this “brilliant” idea to create a Pi design that would feature as many handwritten digits as I could fit into the maximum size rotary screen textile printer (72” by 34”). I had figured each number would be about 3” tall, so I would be able to fit about 1200 of them, nicely spaced, on the fabric....
As I worked, I enjoyed finding little familiarities, like zip codes and famous number sequences (24601!), and I marveled that my own zip code never came up - in fact, very few sequences of more than 4 numbers repeated. I particularly loved the funny section with six 9's in a row. And I thought often about the scale of what I was working on. My mind could barely comprehend thousandths - just the first three digits of Pi - 3.141. By the time I finished, the enormity (minisculity?) of the number I was copying gave me a new appreciation for Pi, its mystery, its profundity (life, the universe, and everything!).
I had this “brilliant” idea to create a Pi design that would feature as many handwritten digits as I could fit into the maximum size rotary screen textile printer (64” by 64”). I had figured each number would be about 3” tall, so I would be able to fit about 1000 of them, nicely spaced, on the fabric.
Will you join me in marveling at Pi, and helping me to make sure I copied it over correctly? There is just no way that I did this completely perfectly. I am a human being and I am sure I made some mistakes, probably during the hours when I was listening to my Civil War Podcast, or when my teenage son was reading the groups of numbers to me while also playing Clash Royale on his phone. Medieval scribes made all kinds of errors, from skipped words (leaving out non is a really big mistake!) to homeotelutons, and I’m sure I did the same.
Google Shopping ads rely on the product category code to decide what the product is - and therefore who should see the product and how much the merchant is going to pay Google to place an ad for it in front of that person.
If the code for the product we are selling is not available, there is no way for us to explain what the product is and who should be seeing the ad. This wastes our money by putting ads in front of people who don't need to see them. And it keeps us from getting seen by the people who do want to find us.
So, as I was assigning product category codes to our Princess Awesome products, I found out right away that we were going to have trouble running ads. I could not tell Google specifically what we were selling because the correct categories for our products do not exist within their schema.
Now, Rebecca and I have been saying for years that the problem with making adult sizes is that even if we did make them, no one would actually want to wear them because they would put them on and realize immediately that they look just like Mrs. Frizzle. And who wants to be Mrs. Frizzle?!
Well, it turns out that I do.
More than 25 years later, I have lived the gamut of consequences that accompany a life trained to rely on a purse instead of a pocket, the sum total of which has shown me that carrying a purse has made me more vulnerable and incompetent than I otherwise would have been if I’d been equipped with pockets instead.
My daughter is a little obsessed with pandas.
For her birthday last year, I bought her a toy panda family - parents and four kids. They came sweetly dressed in classic Victorian-era clothes.
The first thing my daughter did was take the clothes off the pandas. I suppose that makes sense, since, as we all know, Animals Should Definitely Not Wear Clothing. Tiny as they are, the clothes were promptly lost to the Charybdis that is the toy chaos of my basement. So the pandas went for months and months without any clothes and we just played with them au naturel.
With their clothes lost, we couldn’t tell Mommy Panda or Daddy Panda apart - they’re identical without clothes on. Same thing for Sister and Brother Pandas. That meant that all of their activities and roles were perfectly equalized, since the characters could stand in for each other with no perceivable difference.
When adults speak to children, unless they are fairly well-acquainted, they tend to look for clues to the child’s interests on their clothing. How many times have I said to little boys, “Wow! A dinosaur shirt! You must like dinosaurs”? But I don’t often say that to girls. Why? Because very few items of girls’ clothing feature dinosaurs - or pretty much anything else other than flowers and cute animals.
But now we have collected anecdotal data about the kinds of conversations adults have with girls who are wearing Princess Awesome dresses. They're different:
“My daughter loves "tutus"(any twirly skirt). She also loves dinosaurs & rockets & planes & trains. Significantly, what she wears impacts the kind of conversations people have with her! When she wears her rocket dress- adults talk to her about being an astronaut & flying to the moon!”
