Helen FieldsScience Writer

People who like to mess with yarn fall into two camps: knitters and crocheters. In knitting, you use two sticks and it’s a disaster if you drop a stitch. In crochet, you use one hook and I don’t know if it’s even possible to drop a stitch. There’s a lot I don’t know about crochet. In fact, until the beginning of July, the only thing I knew how to do was to crochet a single chain of loops that I could use to start knitting a sock or a hat.

The first weekend of July, I was at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival and saw a table for the Smithsonian Community Reef. Someone taught me how to crochet a pseudosphere – it’s like a sphere, kind of, but in hyperbolic space, which is this other kind of geometry that is not the Euclidean geometry of planes and squares and nice normal things that you learned about in ninth grade. Crocheting hyperbolic shapes turns out to be kind of hypnotic. Here’s me learning how:

The reef is being built by hook-wielding volunteers like me; the pieces all have to be turned in by sometime in September and will be on display at the Natural History Museum as part of the Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef starting October 16. Last week I went to a workshop at a local yarn store to learn more, and I’m now working on my third piece of coral. Here’s the collection so far:

You’ll see that it’s a great way to use up that hideous orange acrylic yarn.

I wrote a blog post about the reef for Smithsonian magazine.

At the crochet coral reef workshop, I hung around with the beginners – I did, technically, already know how to crochet, but I really only knew how to crochet continuously in one direction. So, if I wanted to make spirals, I was fine, but it seemed useful to learn some other skills, and also to learn what the different stitches were called. Also, the friend I brought with me (MJ) was a beginner.

So the beginners were chatting, and I said I was writing a blog post for the Smithsonian, and one of them said, oh, I work at the Smithsonian. Turns out she’s a VIARC volunteer – they’re the ones who answer questions at the information desk. And I said, oh, my mom does that at the Freer and Sackler, and she said, I think I’ve met your mom, she works with my sister-in-law, Sandy. Who I know.

Then the sign-up for the mailing list came around, and the last name on it was someone I knew a little in high school – I was good friends with her little brother. It’s a fairly unusual name. I wandered around the yarn store until I found someone who looked vaguely familiar, asked, and indeed, it was her. She didn’t remember me at all.

(I don’t really know everybody, but I like to pretend I do. Read about it.)

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 everybody. Ok, not really everybody. But for years, friends who go places with me have known that we will probably run into someone I know. It doesn’t matter where – festival, concert, national park, whatever. I don’t know if I know an abnormally large number of people, or if the people I know all have the exact same taste in events, or if I have unusual recall for familiar faces, or what. But I do know that my world gets brightened pretty regularly by running into people who I’m happy to see. (Fortunately, I also like most of the people I know.)

So my friend and neighbor Sheila suggested I blog about this. I’m skeptical – I mean, how interesting can it be? It also seems kind of self-aggrandizing. Omg, I’m so awesome! I know everybody! But the truth is, I might actually know everybody. And Sheila claims to really like these stories and to think they are worth blogging about. Also, almost every time we go to a restaurant or bar in the neighborhood, which is often, I see someone I know. So, here you go, Sheila.

This is actually a subset of the “I know everybody” genre of story – in which two other people discover that they both know me.

Earlier today, my friend MJ wrote to me on google chat:

We’re in [her employer]’s knitting club right now, and [she forgot to type the name, but it was Heather] said “I have a friend who’s knitting a stegosaurus”

I said “that must be Helen Fields”

Of course it was me. I know MJ professionally and Heather through Washington Revels. They both knew I was knitting a stegosaurus because I can’t help bragging on facebook about all my cool new knitting projects. (Stegosaurus pattern here.)

To make the world even smaller, I would like to point out that I knew both Heather and MJ’s significant others before I (or they) knew Heather or MJ. Heather’s husband went to high school with my brother; I was friends with MJ’s boyfriend in high school.

Update, 7/29: Here’s that 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.

Hey, so all those people weren’t lying: The Grand Canyon is spectacular. We only had time for a day trip between the concerts in Phoenix and Las Vegas, but I’m told we picked the prettiest trail to go down. It’s the South Kaibab Trail. It goes down into the canyon along a little ridge, so you get 360-degree views. Wow. It was pretty. And since it’s a canyon, the trail goes down fast. It starts out like this:

and goes on like this:

We stopped for lunch at the little bump just left of the middle of that picture, which also turned out to be a prime spot for knitting.

Yes, I (1) carried a partly-finished sweater 1.5 miles into the Grand Canyon and (2) was still wearing the wristband from the concert two days earlier. The sweater pattern is here, if you want to recreate the experience.

You have to be really careful hiking in the canyon, since this is the opposite of your normal hike – rather than going up (a mountain, say) in the morning and down in the afternoon, we went down and then had to get back up. But we adopted the motto “If you can perceive movement, you’re doing it wrong” and walked really, really, really slowly on the way out. We felt great, and the hike back up only took about 20 more minutes than the hike down. It made me think I could actually handle doing the whole canyon someday. I mean, some *two* days. I’m not crazy. The park is full of signs telling you not to do it in one day, many using this example.

We often wished we had a geologist along. For example, what the heck is going on here? This is in limestone at the top of the canyon (in that first set of switchbacks dropping down into the canyon).

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.

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.

On Wednesday, Chris the photographer and I flew from Seattle to Anchorage. At Anchorage we were following the signs to the “L1″ gate and the signs led us out of security. And I was like, aw, dang, we have to go through security again? I have to empty my water bottle! And I did. And then we got to the gate. And it turns out, not so much with the security. Apparently on these really dinky flights, they just don’t bother.

That’s the plane that left before ours. (And Chris taking a picture of it.) Our flight had exactly three passengers. While we were waiting, the gate agent asked for our weights, then gave us new boarding passes with different seat assignments to balance the plane. It was a three-hour flight – I knitted most of the way. The flight attendant kept coming back to point out landmarks, including various volcanoes, Alaska’s third-largest lake, and her hometown. I have a picture of Mt Redoubt, but Chris’s is so much better you should just wait for our first daily dispatch, appearing here tomorrow.

On Friday I resolved my all-consuming dilemma: What knitting to take on the ship?

Clockwise, from top left: Lace scarf (in the pink bag), sock yarn, and a stack of instructions for knitting socks; yarn for lace scarf; yarn for baby blanket; assorted yarns in case I want to make a hat or something; yarn for super pretty scarf that will make me happy as I knit. The needles I need for these various projects are in the middle. I’m also going to knit wristwarmers for myself on the way to Dutch Harbor. Three flights, none shorter than three hours – I think I’ll have time.

This is probably way too much knitting, but I’d really hate to run out, and there’s no real restriction on how much stuff I take (this all fits into one tiny duffel bag).