and a 4mm crochet hook!

Mould among us – Penicillium

I blame it all on my middle daughter Mel and the top photo. Mel is a recently graduated environmental microbiologist with an enduring scientific passion for fungi. She’s now on the long academic journey to becoming a mycologist – a fungi scientist. It’s because of her that I know that mould is essentially just microscopic fungi.

As part of a project, Mel collected and cultured mould spores collected from the air in houses on petrie dishes. It’s been a long term dream to turn this photo into a knitted cushion for her. Probably a little ambitious for a DFAD gig though. So I concentrated on just one species of mould. See the little blue green colony here? That’s Penicillium – the source of the antibiotic penicillin. (And here I apologise for the Australian spelling – American spelling is mold, Australian spelling is mould).

There are two species names used for the penicillium mould that penicillin the antibiotic is extracted from – Penicillium notatum is the original scientific name but more recently scientists refer to it as Penicillium chyrsogenum. To see penicillium mould’s afinity with mushroom have a look at some pictures of it under a microscope – it’s like a beautiful delicate fringe like flower. But we’re going to make amazing mould colonies.

I made patterns for four penicillium moulds.
Two knitted flat and two crochet.