Polar Knitting

Regular readers of this blog will recall that I made a trip to Svalbard, Norway, last summer. In search of wildlife and dramatic scenery, we spent much of our time cruising the polar waters in open zodiacs. I stayed warm in my very own genuine reproduction Douglas Mawson balaclava. Mawson was an Australian geologist who explored Antarctica in the early decades of last century, including leading the first expedition to reach the magnetic south pole. He knew what he was about when it came to cold weather equipment.

One of my shipmates, Doug Cheeseman admired my Mawson balaclava so much that I promised to make one for him. As the owner of Cheeseman's Ecology Safaris and frequent leader of trips to Antarctica Doug was familiar with Mawson's history, and appreciated the usefulness of balaclavas in very cold environments.

Doug Cheeseman enjoying Arctic Beer

In the spirit of the original, I made Doug's balaclava almost entirely of yarn leftover from other projects.

Mawson's balaclava

For more information and a link to purchase the pattern take a look at Artlab Australia's website.

You may also remember that during my trip to Svalbard I was practicing two color knitting. I originally thought I would use the piece as a scarf, but once it was finished I decided it was too heavy and too bulky to be worn comfortably. Instead I stuffed it (using up lots of long narrow scrap pieces of quilt batting) and have put it on a bed as a bolster. It makes reading in bed more comfortable and more colorful.

If you are wondering about the quilt in this photo, it is the first one I ever made. I started it 1986 when I was laid up after foot surgery, then put it aside unfinished while life - school, marriage, new jobs - got in the way. Somehow after my second daughter was born in 1998 I pulled it out again and finished it.  I'm not entirely sure how I found the time to do it then as I was working full time and had two young children to care for. It's not particularly well made but I still really like it's vibrancy and that I can identify the source of every piece of fabric. Some came from clothes I made for myself, others from home decorating items, and still others were given to me by friends. It shows once again that quilts can warm your heart as well as your toes.

Faces of Svalbard

Feathered and furry, bewhiskered, bearded and bloody, Svalbard has all kinds of faces. No, I am not referring to my shipmates, though by the end of our ten days some of these descriptions were fitting. I am, of course, referring to wildlife, the focus of our trip.

Walruses were the strangest of all the creatures I saw. I had to keep reminding myself that they were real, not some long-extinct creature that we know only from the fossil record. Like seals, they are unwieldy on land, graceful in the water. This one was so curious about us that it popped up right next to our zodiac, water dripping from its whiskers. I wonder what it made of us. Did it take our bright, multi-colored rain jackets for plumage, our big camera lenses for eyes?

On another day we saw a group of walruses sunning and sleeping on the beach. This big male sat apart from the group, obligingly striking poses for our cameras.

Bearded seals' faces have amusingly human-like expressions and big round eyes that give them a childlike innocence. This one seemed to be thinking, "Oh, my! What is that?"

With youthful curiosity, this polar bear cub played in the water near where its mother was eating from a whale carcass (which you can just see in the upper right of the photo). 

Here is the pair of them, the mother showing just how bloody a job it is to eat raw whale meat.

And here is momma bear mid-meal.

This is another young female, making her way to the same carcass. We first spotted her swimming just offshore and watched as she swam first all the way around our ship, as though sizing us up, and then proceeded directly to the carcass, several kilometers distant.

One day we went ashore to take a close look at this polar bear carcass, desiccated, but largely intact, right down to the black tongue lolling out of the left side of the mouth. Impressive teeth!

On a cheerier note, we spent an afternoon watching a puffin colony. Puffins are adorable little birds, with round cheeks, eye markings that might be the envy of Lady Gaga, and large orange and black beaks. A turn of the head gives this one a quizzical look.

The way they swoop around the cliffs makes them devilishly difficult to photograph. Their antics and appealing nature make it worth the effort.

Fox kits are equally appealing. We watched this fuzzy little arctic fox sleep in the afternoon sun, then stretch and show its even fuzzier tummy, eliciting a flurry of shutter clicks and "awws."

On our last day, not far outside of Longyearbyen, we stopped to see reindeer up close. We perched ourselves on a rise several hundred feet from where a few were grazing and waited.  Eventually a couple approached, so close that I could almost reach out and touch them. Some of them looked at us with their eyes turned so that a bit of the white was visible. They looked terrified. Others had calm, dark brown eyes, and mouths that seemed to be smiling, giving them rather sweet expressions.

With a big rack and the right stance, they can look quite regal.

And finally, here is my face, as my shipmates came to know it while we were cruising in zodiacs.

My balaclava, a reproduction of the one Australian explorer Sir Douglas Mawson wore to Antarctica, kept me warm and comfortable through hours of being outdoors. It is a heavy item, weighing in at five and a half ounces (assuming my grandmother's circa 1925 kitchen scale is reasonably accurate), and no surprise, as I knit it with two strands of wool yarn held together.

The pattern, written by Kristin Phillips and Liane Gould for Artlab Australia, can be purchased from the South Australian Museum Shop and comes with detailed instructions for choosing yarn and yarn colors - the original was apparently made from scraps - and with a tag which you may sew into yours to show that you have a genuine reproduction!

The Arctic, in Color

As promised, I am back with more pictures of the far north, this time in color. As you would expect from a world of glaciers and snow, there is a lot of blue. What I find interesting is the amount of variation. It comes in all shades and intensities. Sometimes it is subtle, such as in this blue-green water, milky from glacial flour.

Sometimes it stands out in stark contrast to its grey surroundings.

It can have a crispness to it.

The blue can be eye-poppingly intense,

and seemingly everywhere on sunny days.

There are also many browns in the arctic. I love the rich browns of this bearded seal (which I should note was an incredibly patient model).

In this scene ruddy brown rocks make glacier blue look brighter.

Humans have left their own colorful marks on Svalbard, as at this old mining site where the hut's wood has a greenish hue.

This photo gives you an idea of the hut's setting.

Uphill from the hut stands a pile of disused rusty red equipment.

Birds bring a lot of color to the arctic, though generally in small doses, such as the pale yellow collar of long-tailed skuas,

and bright orange feet and beaks of puffins.

Glaucous gulls have yellow beaks,

as do kittiwakes.

Then there are the brilliant, almost neon colors of things that seem to be lit from within. Surrounded by snow, ice and bare rock, purple mountain saxifrage really stands out.

 The brightness of mossy tundra hints at its promise as a source of sustenance for wildlife

My favorite is the vibrant aqua of glacier ice which makes icebergs seem almost as alive as the wildlife.

My needlework project for this trip was appropriately colorful: a fair isle practice piece. This is in preparation for eventually knitting a fair isle sweater for myself. My difficulty is getting the tension of the two yarns just right so that the fabric lies flat and even. Here is a view of the piece at my hotel in Longyearbyen, the starting point of our trip. 

For most of the trip the piece sat untouched on a shelf in the ship's lounge, where my shipmates probably got sick of looking at it, but I did get a lot done on the flights home.

The patterns are from "Alice Starmore's Book of Fair Isle Knitting," an excellent source of history, techniques, patterns, color and more, for anyone interested in Fair Isle.

I'll be back soon with photos of wildlife from Svalbard and of the colorful town of Longyearbyen.

The Arctic, in Black and White

My recent experience on and around the arctic islands of Svalbard was a bit like watching The Wizard of Oz, one moment everything was black and white, and the next all was in vivid color. In this post I explore the former; in the next I will address the latter. Note that although this is about black and white, all of the images in this post are actually color photos. I simply was recording a world that, at least on some days and under certain conditions, was predominantly black and white.

Prinz Karls Forland (Prince Charles Foreland)

Coming from the unrelenting sun of a Texas summer, I found the natural coolness of blacks, whites, and grays refreshing. More importantly, the monochrome world made me see differently. Without hue, I had to look to shape and line, value and contrast for interest. Svalbard offered no shortage of interesting scenes. The largest island, Spitsbergen, meaning “pointed mountains” lives up to its name. We saw hundreds of peaks, their shapes highlighted in snow and ice. This pair of little peaks was noteworthy because of their crazy lava-lamp like reflections in water disturbed by our zodiacs.

After our windiest night (which, given that we were above the Arctic circle in late June, was "night" only by convention, not by amount of light) I awoke to to see this little schooner that had sought shelter in the same fjoird as we, and for a moment thought I had been transported into another century. The bit of blue glacier ice seen adjacent to the schooner's bowsprit makes me think of old black and white portraits with color-enhanced cheeks, lips and eyes.

Even some of the wildlife is naturally black and white. For example, these little auks, also known as dovekies, are entirely black and white (and endearingly plump).

Arctic terns, in contrast to the round little auks, are sleek and streamlined, thoroughly modern-looking birds. They are also fiercely protective of their nests, and make a huge fuss, including flying at your head, if you get too close. I am cheating a bit to include them here since they have red beaks, but my image of them is mostly a whir of white and grey, so they have earned their place.

On the other end of the size spectrum from little auks and terns are the whales. On our first night out, as we cruised north from Longyearbyen, we spotted over half a dozen humpback and blue whales, their spouts easily seen in flat water, lines of fins and flukes fluid as the inky water in which they smoothly appeared and disappeared.

Humpback whale fluke

And then, of course, there are polar bears, referred to by some as great white bears. What is it about polar bears that fascinates us so? Perhaps it their whiteness, a color we associate with purity and innocence, in contrast to the ruthless reality of the hunting on which their lives depend, but which is anything but innocent.

Note that polar bears are not actually white, but rather a yellowish color. When sleeping on-shore among the rocks they can easily be mistaken for just another boulder.

This final image of the front of a glacier is from a sunny day, but taken in the shadow of a tall peak, and so was very grey. The layers and fractures record year after year of snowfall and the constant compaction and flow that define a glacier.

In my next post I will return to full color, and share some recent needlework. See you soon.

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