Blue Majesty

I knew blue whales were the largest know animal species in the world, but I didn't really learn anything else about them until my son had to do a report about them when he was in first grade several years ago. One of the things that my son did for his report was take a twelve foot tall sunflower that he had grown in our garden to school the day the class drew an outline of a blue whale in the playground with chalk. The children used the sunflower to measure the length of a blue whale...which, by the way, can grow up to 100 feet long and be upwards to 200 tons. He was so proud of his sunflower and the children had so much moving the sunflower around the playground measuring. We were all very impressed with how large a blue whale was, especially when we were all standing inside of the lines where we looked like little specks compared to the size of the whale.

However, I never fully realized how enormous a blue whale must be until I saw a humpback whale in the Barents Sea on a family vacation in 2003. The humpback whale is a species of baleen whale, the same family of whales as the blue whale, and measures over 50 feet long. I remember standing on the bow of the ship where we were looking for whales and suddenly next to us a huge humpback whale breached. We all just stood their in awe and silence and couldn't believe what we were witnessing. The whale graced us with a beautiful acrobatic dance slapping its tail and pectorals for what seemed like an eternity. At the end of the great dance, the whale breached one last time as if to say goodbye to all of us before returning to the deep blue water.  We all watched for a very long time to see if it would come back, but we never saw it again.

I made my Blue Majesty basket using natural brown and dyed dark blue Long Leaf pine needles, blue artificial sinew, Peruvian blue whale beads and a blue crystallized agate center base. Enjoy!

P.S. If you want to learn more about blue whales, please watch this wonderful National Geographic special entitled Kingdom of the Blue Whales and find out how you can help save the whales!

The humpback whale photos were taken by my husband in the Barents Sea and the whale sizing graph is from Wikipedia.