it's springtime time
middle school fanart & narwhals
hello , it’s April! in Michigan, this means it was 60F and sunny yesterday, and today we woke up to snow… but I don’t mind much as long as I can hang out outside without a coat and a hat at least for a couple days out of the week. this month in my bird calendar is dedicated to the Piping plover, a bird unfortunately well-known in Michigan for being endangered. they return from migration in April and stay along the shores of the Great Lakes through the summer to nest and raise their perfect cottonball-shaped chicks.
this months Knitting News: I have finished the stripey tank top mentioned last month, made a fuzzy chartreuse cropped shirt, knit a weird scrappy rectangle, and started my first proper colorwork project - Norwegian Selbu mittens.
croptop pattern / tanktop pattern / mitten pattern
my goal is to knit a colorwork sweater this year, and having never done any stranded colorwork, I decided to start small with mittens. knitting with two strands held in both hands is not easy to get used to, and I definitely still have trouble holding even tension, but regardless, I am happy with how they are looking and how fast they work up. even with frequent undoing of rows, one mitten took me about ~16 hours across 4 days - not very fast compared to a more experienced knitter but it feels quick for me with a new technique. one more mitten to go!
I realized after promising some in-depth analysis of my experience watching all of the X-Files last time I wrote, that I actually don’t have that much to say… oops! media analysis is not really my thing, and I have quickly moved on to watching other shows. instead, I offer you middle-school fanart I did of the X-Files, and the sole recommendation to not watch past season 5 unless you rreeallllyy want to. after season 5, the show relocates filming from rainy spooky Vancouver to Los Angeles, and thus suffers a dramatic loss of vibes. it’s mostly downhill from there.
NARWHAL FACTS
their tusk is an enlongated spiraling left canine, and it is their only functional tooth. those tusks can grow up to 10 feet long, it’s rare but possible for males to grow two, and females usually have no tusks. their tusks are used for detecting changes in the water, communicating with each other, and whacking fish, among other things.
their name comes from Old Norse nárhval, meaning “corpse-whale” - their spotty coloring and their tendency to lay motionless at the surface of the water is pretty similar to how a drowned sailor may look
narwhals closest relatives are the belugas, and it is possible for them to hybridize. they rarely cross paths in the wild, but crossbreeding may happen more as climate change alters narwhal and beluga migration patterns.
to close out today’s newsletter, here is a list of things that have brought me joy this month despite it all: elephant seals, Severance season 2, the crocus’ growing in our yard, Perfume Genius’ new album Glory, knitting with green yarn, the sun rising at 7, watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer for the first time, mango gelato, going to the gym, and Endless Oceans: Blue World on the Wii.
i’ve put a couple new sketchbook scans on my website, and i always welcome guestbook entries as well as comments here about anything at all. don’t be a stranger!
i hope you enjoyed reading this installment of my newsletter! if you have thoughts to share/questions to ask/fun facts to tell me about, please reach out to me by replying to this email, or messaging me on any of my social media linked on my website at augustcampbellart.com - thank you!