up close & personal: the clothes & jewels of Downton Abbey

Here's an up close and personal look at the exquisite details that are featured in the costumes of Downton Abbey.   Costume designer Caroline McCall really stays true to the era portrayed on the series.  The characters have gone from the styles of 1912 to the now current episodes in the fabulous jazz age of the 1920's. Glamour magazine interviewed McCall, and you can enjoy her behind-the-scene comments about Downton here.    

ciao! Fabiana

for more , visit Downton Abbey

Golden Gardens

Two posts back, at Lake Quinault, I noted that beaches are easy to make.  But that doesn't mean that they are simple, that they are all the same, or that they fail to exhibit an amazing amount of small-scale spatial and temporal variability.

A late afternoon walk at Golden Gardens found lots of stuff happening - much of which will be erased within a few tide cycles. And replaced with something else.

Waves on a rising tide will sometimes leave a swash bar like this sandy one lapped up onto the beach face.  Perhaps the band of gravel at the water line was the coarse lag left behind when that rising tide pushed the sand up the beach.  Seepage from the beach face formed complex alluvial channels on the lower beach face.  A high tide gravel ridge to the north recorded the story of strong southerly waves during a recent high tide.

Meadow Point is a barrier beach that curves sharply and there are big differences as you walk from the sandy beach on the south to the gravelly one on the north. By the way, this northern beach was probably always coarser than the southern one, but the current pattern was reinforced by the gravel that was added in the mid 1990s to address the chronic erosion of the northern shore (possibly attributable to the loss of sediment from the north after the railroad was built, but that's another story).

AERIAL VIEW

Kalaloch

Kalaloch, and the Olympic Coast in general, deserve a lot more attention than they're going to get here, and a lot more thought than I could generate in a very short visit.

The tide was pretty high and every few minutes a larger wave set would spill across the beach and into the stream mouth, generating a small bore that slowly worked its way upstream.  It's easy to see how large wood from the beach gets rafted into the little estuary and pushed up against the bank below the lodge.

Remarkably, this is the first trip to this section of Washington's coast since I began the blog and the only post between Washaway Beach and Tsoo-Yess Beach. Some of these areas I know fairly well and some I don't, but regardless, it's been too long.

AERIAL VIEW

Lake Quinault

One of the themes I've come back to in talks the last few years is the that beaches are pretty easy to create. It doesn't take unusual circumstances and it doesn't require much time. It just takes some loose sand or gravel-size sediment and enough wave action to keep it moving around. They show up in a lot of places. But they don't all look like the ones in the Corona ads, which is what makes them so interesting.

Beaches are relatively common on larger lakes where there is sufficient fetch to generate reasonable waves, at least if there is the right size of sediment to build from. But lakes don't make beaches easy. Freshwater doesn't pose the same impediments to shoreline vegetation as does saltwater, so plants thrive at the water's edge, sheltering and stabilizing sediment. And in the Northwest, I suspect most lakes, at least prior to significant development, were fringed with fallen trees and big wood, which would discourage beaches.

AERIAL VIEW

This beach is at the bottom of the slope below the Lake Quinault Lodge on the south shore of the lake. A small point creates a favorable orientation for a small swash-aligned beach. Of course, on lakes like this, the beach may well have been created intentionally with the clearing of vegetation and maybe even the addition of some gravel, but I'm not sure.

As far as I know, the level of Lake Quinault is not managed and simply reflects the natural ability of the outlet (the Quinault River) to pass the water that flows in from the upper watershed.  The lake can fluctuate significantly -- you can see a wrack line behind the beach where the water reached about a week earlier.  I walked a section of the lakeside trail and was impressed by the amount of big drift wood rafted into the low areas surrounding the lake.

Beach and water hunting

I always refer to myself as a beach and water hunter,  meaning I prefer to metal detect on the beach and in the water. 

I never just take my metal detector to the beach ready to search one area, if the beach looks more promising than the water, I will detect up in the dry sand or down in the wet sand. 

Yesterday I had my eye on several local beach cams, even though the temperatures were in the 70s there was hardly any people swimming in the water. 

For south Florida standards, It has been chilly just recently and I have noticed more people staying on the beach instead of swimming. 

I had a short window of opportunity to metal detect yesterday afternoon , so I decided to take my CTX 3030 for a walk in the dry sand.

I searched along a promising area I saw on the beach web cam, an area that had many people sitting on their towels on the beach through-out the day.

Even though I had checked the beach cam several times through-out the day and saw hardly anyone using the water, I was surprised to see four people water hunting.  

Sometimes you have to go where the people are to find gold, instead of blindly following the old water hunters saying of "Its all in the water" 

I found two silver rings, a junk ring and junk chain,  a $100.00 fashion watch,  a 14K gold ear ring, a small 10 K gold kids ring and a 1963 silver dime,  I dare wager my jewelry finds were more than all four water hunters found yesterday afternoon. 

The mid beach opposite this popular tourist beach had probably not been detected over the weekend,  as I know there is a crazy number of water hunters at this one beach. 

Gold is out there for beach and water hunters to find,  you just have to avoid being a "Box hunter" and be a beach and water hunter.