Category Archives: Periodic Blackwork

Molybdenum is a trace element – one required by the human body but only in small quantities. It is essential for the function of three different metabolic enzymes and thankfully deficiency is rare as it is found in most foodstuffs. Legumes are particularly high in molybdenum: it’s well worth giving peas a chance.

“Proclaim Liberty Throughout All the Land Unto All the Inhabitants thereof” This quotation from Leviticus 25:10 is cast into the Liberty Bell, an iconic symbol of American independence. The words resonate today, the day that Joe Biden was inaugurated as the 46th President of the United States of America. I stitched this bell pattern whileContinue reading “Americium”

Today two metals adjacent in the sixth period of the Periodic Table, rhenium and osmium, and in common with their neighbours, iridium, tungsten and platinum, they are very dense. In fact, osmium is the most dense element of all, narrowly pipping iridium. Osmium has few uses as it is rare and hard to work with.Continue reading “Nibs and blades”

Tantalum and niobium lie one below the other in Group V of the Periodic Table. They were discovered within a year of each other, in 1802 and 1801 respectively, though for a while there was some confusion as to whether they were one and the same element or indeed whether there was a third distinctContinue reading “Tragic Greeks”

Today two patterns based on electrical symbols to represent applications of tungsten (left) and ruthenium (right). Tungsten has the highest melting point of all metals. It was used extensively in the filaments of incandescent light bulbs throughout the 20th century and so I have based my pattern on a electrical symbol for an incandescent bulb.Continue reading “Bulbs and switches”

I hesitated for a moment over whether to use a Star of David to represent meitnerium as Lise Meitner did not count herself Jewish by religion and as a young woman was baptised in to the Protestant church, but nevertheless she was ethnically Jewish and this had an enormous impact on her later life. MeitnerContinue reading “Meitnerium”

Vanadium was discovered not once but twice. In 1801 the Spanish mineralogist Andrés Manuel del Río, working in Mexico City, analysed a sample of the mineral now known as vanadite and concluded that it contained a new element. He first named the element panchromium, from the Greek for ‘all the colours’, as it formed manyContinue reading “Nuevos elementos”

Following on from indium and thallium back in the p-block, some more colourful chemistry today with rhodium and chromium. I’m rather enjoying finding ways of getting some colour into a black and white design! William Hyde Wollaston was an English chemist who made his fortune by purifying and selling platinum. It was while extracting theContinue reading “Roses are red, sunflowers are yellow”

The city of Darmstadt lies in the state of Hesse, in the centre of modern-day Germany. It was once the capital of the Grand Duchy of Hesse, with an army of Hessian soldiers wearing uniforms of a brown woven jute cloth which, as a result, came to be known as hessian. In 1905 the GrandContinue reading “City and state”