Update!

 The ribs are done!

They're laid out here in order, with the tail end on the left, head on the right. They're not spaced three feet apart in this photo, so the total length show here is considerably less than 28 feet... however, I didn't have 28 feet of space available, and I wanted to see how they looked all lined up. You may also notice there's a tenth rib in this picture. I added an extra rib  1.5 feet before rib "A", which is halfway between A and where the tip of the whale's nose will be.

Also, I've discovered that I'm not particularly adept at taking panoramic shots with my phone camera. This was the best that I could manage after about 12 attempts.

In it's current state, the skeleton doesn't take up much space. The ribs can all stack neatly against one another and be leaned up against a wall. I'm anxious to get the spine parts of the skeleton underway, but once they've been attached to the ribs, I'm going to need a considerably larger storage space for the project. My teachers and I figured out that the best option would be to store it in a huge hammock-type sling that would have ropes attached to it and would run through hooks or pulleys on the ceiling - that way, the whale unit can be pulled up to the ceiling and out of the way while I'm not working on it, and then I can lower it down whenever I need to. 

So here's the drawing/design studio at my school:

And this the far side of the studio. The whale hammock will fit in between the wall and the lighting tracks. The room is 27 feet long, so I'll be able to fit the whole skeleton except the tail, which I'll need to make separately and attach at the very end. 

Some lovely people that work for the city of St. John's came into school the other day and installed some pulleys in the ceiling for me: (They're small, but there's two in this picture - one on the left side, and one on the right)

So all I need now before I can make a whale hammock is a few anchor points low on the wall with the door that I'll be able to tie the other end of the rope off onto.

And, in other news, my 25 lbs bale of wool arrived! It contained 93 skeins of wool, 10 of which went to a classmate of mine, so I am left with 83 skeins, which will hopefully be enough to knit a whale with. 

While I'm not ready to start the actual knitting quite yet, I'll have to dye all this wool before I can knit with it anyway. I've dyed plenty of wool before, but never this much at once, so I'm a bit nervous about that. 

The dye I'll be using is an exotic natural dye called logwood extract. Using iron as a mordant, it will give a lovely grey colour with purple-y sort of undertones.