The Japanese Garden Shawl

And here we see a picture of the Japanese Garden Shawl (by Wendy D Johnson) finally blocking. I've been calling this the "two week shawl," because that's about how long it took me. It wasn't so quick because it was super-easy, or small, it was quick because the lace patt was memorable and I had hours of dedicated knitting time when I was flying to and from CampKIP. I didn't do a lot of knitting on it when I was at camp because I was too busy being social and doing other things. But plane rides....those are just made for knitting lace off of a chart. Oh, and if you're wondering what those white blotches are - that's sheets of paper I shoved between the shawl and the blocking squares so that you could actually see the lace pattern in a picture. Does help, doesn't it? And in case it doesn't help enough, below are a couple of additional pictures of the lace (more of the close-up variety) so that you can see both more of the lace pattern and the hand spun yarn that I made it out of.

Now, on to something which has to do with crafting, but not fibre. Strange, I know. Below is a craft project that the finacee has been working on for me for my Steampunk Wonder Woman outfit. What you see in this first picture is a picture of the bracers, the practice, and the raw material.

 This is his practice piece. What you can see in this picture is a bit of the pattern on the raw material. The raw material, by the way, is an old cookie tin that we picked up at Good Will. It's a thin metal with some sort of raised paper overlay - not that we could tell that at the time. The Fiancee - GMan, took some metal snips and cut the bottom out and discarded it. Then he took a portion of it off and tried different ways of putting holes into it. Since we determined that my bracers should be lace-up with leather thongs, there were two things we had to be able to do: Accomodate the width of the thongs and also give them somewhere to lace that wouldn't shred them. That meant grommets. So he worked on the material with a few different tools to find a way to drill the holes without damaging the paper overlay which had the floral pattern. He also had to think of a way that I would be able to wear the bracer without having my arm and wrist be shredded. The solution was to turn down the sharp edges he had cut as well as possible and then cover them over with superglue. Very inventive - but then, that's why I love him!

And here is the final product!

Is this amazing or what?