I Understand Houndstooth On A Much Deeper Level Than You

There is an episode of 30 Rock in which Jack and Liz agree that the worst people in the world are graduate students. That quote pops up in my head periodically when I find myself talking someone's ear off about the history of the cage crinoline or archival storage methods, but generally I think I avoid being one of those graduate students.

However, I've noticed one thing that stimulates my over-educated snobbery like nothing else:

This pattern is known as houndstooth. Last semester in my Fiber & Fabrics class we were given a little sample of houndstooth and told to figure out how it is woven. I spent a long time looking at it under magnification and charting what I saw on a piece of graph paper. Eventually, it all clicked and I was the first one in my class to make sense of it. Basically, it is bands of white and black (both vertically and horizontally) meeting in a twill pattern. A twill pattern is where each yarn goes over two and under two (instead of 1/1 as in plain weave). It naturally creates horizontal lines across the fabric. When you have alternating colors you basically end up with a pattern that looks like squares with little diagonal twill tails sneaking out. Here is an excellent picture that I found:

I can sense you glazing over already. Sorry. I'll wrap it up.

Anyway, ever since I had my houndstooth breakthrough, I feel sort of emotionally attached to it. Whenever I see someone wearing it, I think smugly to myself, "that person doesn't understand houndstooth like I do." Things get worse when I see knit houndstooth. You see, the whole point of houndstooth is that it is a clever use of a simple weave structure. Knitting the pattern makes no sense. It is like writing a part in a movie for Tina Fey and then deciding to cast Megan Fox instead. Clearly you have no understanding of the awesomeness of Tina Fey.

So to sum up: now that I am a graduate student, the sight of a patterned scarf fills me with a feeling of moral superiority. Clearly, graduate students are the worst.