Helen FieldsScience Writer

Remember the Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef? It’s an ongoing project – they’ll keep mounting exhibits of parts of it in different places. Right now there’s a show in Pasadena. But I heard good news recently about the Smithsonian Community Reef, the part that I contributed to. It’s going on display at the Putnam Museum in Davenport, Iowa, and will stay up for five years. (So there’s plenty of time to plan your vacation to Eastern Iowa.) Read about it here.

A friend pointed out this nifty link to me: an artist who makes life-sized crochet versions of animals. Crochet + taxidermy = crochetdermy. Clever, eh?

The writer seems to think “knit” and “crochet” can be used interchangeably, but as far as I can tell from the pictures, these are all crocheted.

At last, the Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef has opened at the natural history museum! You may recall, I was crocheting some pieces for this exhibit over the summer – this is what they looked like – and dropped them off at a local yarn store in August. The show opened earlier this month, and last Thursday I went down to see my work in the Smithsonian.

The coral reef is at the back of the museum’s Ocean Hall. The organizers took all the individual pieces, submitted by crafters like me, from all kinds of yarns and done in all sorts of ways, and assembled them into one three-dimensional, multi-colored extravaganza of coral. It’s stunning. I walked around it for about 20 minutes, and while I was there several tourists stopped to admire it, then exclaim at the fact that it was made of yarn. (Most of them misidentified it as knitting, but oh well, guess you can’t expect everyone to know the difference. Or read the signs.)

Here’s what the whole reef looks like:

The genesis of the reef is a little complicated – I’ll try to give the short version. A mathematician who knits figured out that the easiest way to model hyperbolic shapes is to crochet them. Hyperbolic geometry is a kind of geometry that describes sort of ruffly space, like a leaf of kale or a piece of coral. A pair of sisters were crocheting these models in brightly colored yarn and noticed that the pile of objects looked kind of like a coral reef. Ta-da! The Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef was born. Read about it here.

I walked up to it and saw one of my pieces immediately. Can you spot it in the picture below? (Refresh your memory here.)

It took me longer to find the others, but I eventually located four out of five. Another one is in this picture. It’s a little harder to pick out:

The above picture is from the “toxic” section of the reef, crocheted mostly out of trash. People used plastic bags, soda can tabs, and other unsavory materials. The piece of mine I couldn’t find was made out of audiotape. It turns out a lot of people had that idea. I think I found it, but I’m not sure. It could’ve been someone else’s cleverly crocheted audiotape.

My work is part of the Smithsonian Community Reef – called that because it’s made by crafty types like me. The exhibit includes several displays from other iterations of the Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef, but the community reef is the centerpiece and the best-looking part, I thought. It’s on display through April 24, 2011. Look for my name in the list of contributors! Ok, it looks like this:

For all my Museum Tourist posts, click here.

My coral reef is finished! I dropped it off at Now and Then, a store in Takoma Park, Md., that sells yarn (and lots of other neat stuff).

The only addition since my last update is the brown-black one at top left – that’s the tape from one audio cassette. It is not the easiest material in the world to crochet with. The finished product sure is neat, though!

My own personal Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef now has four pieces:

I’m pleased that I haven’t bought any new yarn for this. The caution tape is recycled, of course, and the bright orange and red acrylic yarns came from the great-aunt of a fellow science writer. They gave me the dark blue at the coral reef workshop, and the light edging on that piece came from the yarn stash of another fellow science writer. Good times!

A friend brought me a box of cassette tapes that she was about to throw out, so I may see what I can do with that next. When all this is done, I’ll drop it off at a local yarn store or take it to the museum, and it’ll all be on display starting in October! It’ll be fun to see if I can find my pieces on the community reef.

Read about the Smithsonian’s display of the Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef here.

I do a heck of a lot of knitting, most of it not really suited for a work blog. But I feel this is legitimate science and paleontology and…oh, cmon, look how cute this little guy is:

The pattern is modified from this knitted stegosaurus.

I know, this is my work blog about science and dictionaries (and travel and music and whatnot), but I’m too excited and must blog about the knitting project I just started:

Doesn’t it look cool on the needle? Oh, what is it? I can’t tell! It’s a secret! I can tell you that the yellow is “Comfy,” a blend of pima cotton and acrylic, and the blue is some Cascade 220 wool left over from a sweater that I’ve finished knitting but haven’t sewn together yet. Because this is the time of year when the Christmas knitting gets serious and everything else must be dropped.

Check it out: I wrote about ice in the Bering Sea for the website of Deadliest Catch,  the Discovery Channel show about crab fishing in the Bering Sea. There’s been a lot more ice than usual the last couple of years, which is weird, what with the whole global warming thing. I explained why for the benefit of the show’s fans.

In other Deadliest Catch news, check out this awesome knitting pattern for a crab, inspired by the show.

As the scientist standing at the window next to me said a few minutes ago: “They wouldn’t show *this* on Deadliest Catch, would they?” The Bering Sea is absolutely dead calm. It looks like a pond, only flatter.

You can see a whale surface a mile away, because there is nothing between here and there. I’ve only seen two whales, a pair of humpbacks after lunch, but other people have seen minke whales and a fin whale today. I also saw some Steller’s sea lions swimming in the distance and a whole bunch of far-off harbor porpoises, and I have high hopes for orcas. I mean, what I *want* is humpbacks leaping over the bow, but I’ll take orcas.

I was interviewing a scientist when Chris got the page about the humpbacks and I dragged her up to the bridge with me to see what was going on. It worked out well, that bit of multi-tasking – we saw whales and I learned some basic physical oceanography, all at the same time.

We’re out of the ice for the last time. We’ll be back in port on Tuesday.

If you’re following my facebook updates, you’ll know that I am not, in fact, immune to seasickness. Ah well. It takes a very unusual form: I feel off balance when the ship gets to a sampling station and *stops* moving. My inner ears apparently can only deal with life when we’re actively on the move, breaking ice. Lame, huh? No nausea, though, so I can’t really complain.

The woman who runs the CTD (a standard oceanographic sampling instrument) is a knitter. Awwww yeeeahhh. That makes two I’ve found hidden in the science party, and I’ve heard rumors of two more – both men – in the Coast Guard.

We’re not far from St. Matthew’s Island and several people have seen a McKay’s bunting, a little finchy bird that nests here and nowhere else. One was hopping around while people were working on the ice yesterday, and one was hanging around the ship this morning.

I saw a bunch of seals yesterday but they were all really far away. The way to see seals up close is to hang out on the bridge all day. Too bad I have other work to do.