Helen FieldsScience Writer

From the British Museum in London, I bring you a lady spinning fleece into yarn:

The label says it was made in Athens around 490 BC. Some people who make their own yarn still spin this way, with a drop spindle. You hold the wool in one hand and spin the yarn around with the other, just like the nice lady is doing on the vase.

This was in a section on daily life – apparently Ancient Greek ladies made their families’ clothing from scratch.

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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.

If you’ve been meaning to see the Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef at the Smithsonian, you only have a few more days; it closes this Sunday, April 24th.

It’s surprising how much a bunch of knotted yarn can look like a real live coral reef.

If you miss it in D.C., there will be other reefs in other places, though who knows if my five pieces will ever appear again. Watch this page for a list of upcoming appearances. (Part of it will be in New York from May.)

photo: me

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.

Love this – a crocheter covering the Wall Street bull statue in her work. (In the dead of night.) Be sure to watch the video. Thanks to my friend Megan for pointing it out.

I couldn’t resist going back to the Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef this weekend. And my mom said she hadn’t realized from my previous pictures quite how big it is. So here’s another picture, with a gaggle of Japanese teenagers for scale:

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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:

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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.

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.