Saltwater Purls

Statue...???

Sometimes I don't know what to do with Finlays art work. This latest piece had us in stitches...

What would you call it. Daycare called it 'statue'. Here's the proud artiste.

A Rosy Future?

well Rosa is finished. I'm not sure if it was a good choice for a larger bust. The buttons have to go. I thought they  looked retro but they're the wrong colour.

Pattern: Rosa from Thrown Together by Kim Hargreaves
Yarn: RYC Cashsoft 4ply
Words of Wisdom: I didn't make any major changes except lengthening the body. The ruffles were painful. In particular I had trouble binding off loosely.

Roses wrist warmers

I have a new viewing obsession. Dr Who. I've just finished season 2 and in the final tear jerker scene, Rose Tyler wears some lovely wrist warmers. Wouldn't it be wonderful to be a time traveler, escaping everything you have to do, adventuring and seeing amazing things, and in the end be returned moments after you left. Of course Dr Who never does that, you usually end up somewhere you don't want to be crying in your pea soup. Like a good knitter I spied the gloves and wanted to posses them the moment she appeared on the screen with them. Wouldn't you know it the rabid Dr Who fan base has already created a pattern. I'm making some modifications of course. The yarn is Garnstudio DROPS Angora-Tweed.

On the high seas

Well I'm back and I can say California is mightly nice this time of year. The cruise was a success...not a ridiculous success but we will be able to satisfy our promises to NSF. I took two grads and an undergrad to San Diego with me. First checking in. You'll be pleased to know as of 30 days ago our ports are safer, you can not walk on a port unless you have a twix card and that will be $100+ thank you homeland security. Second, the guy at the front desk was pleased to tell us we'd be sailing on the bucket....the bucket?...yes the barf bucket. This is the point where you smile nicely and hope the students behind you were not listening too closely.

The Robert Gordon Spoul is one of the smaller boats in the Scripps fleet (the Melville in my Tahiti pictures is one of the biggest). And to be honest, there were no comfortable spots on the boat. The galley was right at the front and the cook suggested we could always take our food to the fantail to eat if we felt sick. The indoor lab was small and the fantail frequently flooded. That was okay becuase I soon learned that there was no hope of collecting a kasten core unless the conditions were calm and fortunately the conditions were calm most of the time.

We collected lots and lots of mud from the last 2 thousand years and the wonderful stratigraphy meant we very quickly learnt the age of the end of the core (within 200 years ) based on flooding events (the grey layers.

Our last move was to try and get some sediments from below 2000 years from a different part of the Santa Barbara Basin...a move that put us in the median strip of the shipping lanes, but the sea picked up and we were unsuccessful at getting any sediment (ie we kept dragging the coring device along the bottom as the current swept us off position in the 'moderate' seas).