Time for the pins

My 'blossoms by the brook' shawl is finished!  Or um, somewhat finished.  All the knitting is done.  All that's left is to weave in the ends and block it.

I had to go out and buy some foam squares for blocking.  The last blocking surface I had (a big piece of styrofoam) got turned into trees for one of my kids' projects.  I've got the surface now, so tomorrow, time to break out the pins.

Something I used to do

I seem to remember that I used to do a lot of tatting.  I still like my tatting shuttles, but I'm just fickle when it comes to crafting.  I do whatever I feel like, no rhyme and reason to it.

Jon over at Tat-a-Renda shared a little motif, so I decided to break out the shuttles and see if I can still flip a knot.

Looks like I still can.

Blossoms growing

The 'blossoms by the brook' shawl is growing.  If fact it's gotten a little overgrown.  I followed the pattern until the last few rows and realized I had a lot more yarn left.  So I unraveled the top 10 or so rows of decreases and added in some more repeats.  It really, really hurt to watch those long, long rows getting undone, but I decided I'd rather that than have a lot of unused yarn.

I'm pretty sure there's enough yarn to finish.  Unfortunately, pretty sure is not the same as absolutely sure.  Ah well, when in doubt, knit faster.

Tissue foil

I thought I'd show origami shells again.  They are all folded with tissue foil which is a layer of aluminum foil sandwiched between layers of tissue paper, all held together with mounting spray.

This is the first time I've folded tissue foil.  It's weird stuff.  You can erase folds and scrunch and sculpt it in fun ways, but if I spend a lot of time folding with it, the back of my teeth start to ache.

The top two are the hawk wing conch designed by Robert J. Lang.  The bottom left ones are the sea snail shell and the spiral shell designed by Toshikazu Kawasaki.  The shell in the middle bottom row is designed by Davor Vinko.

In other crafts, I've pulled out the sewing machine and started work on my baju kurung.  I read this article about serging and finally got around to teaching myself how to finish serger threads.  This is the neatest underarm seam I've ever done!

Still fun to knit

This is my favourite part of knitting a shawl.  I'm about a third of the way up.  There is enough knit that the pattern starts to show but the rows aren't drearily long yet.  From now on, it's going to require some perseverance to keep on knitting.

The pattern is 'Blossoms by the Brook' by Ilga Leja.

More sea creatures

Want to see more creatures?  There are polymer clay creatures made by my little lady.  There are origami shells (designs by Robert Lang, Toshikazu Kawasaki and DavorVinko) and knit marine life (designs by Hansi Singh).  The creatures were well received in my kids' zoology session and served their educational purpose.

My educational obligations fulfilled, I'm on to other projects.  I should be sewing this 'baju kurung'.  I cut it weeks ago and I need it to replace all the faded, old, disreputable looking ones in my closet.

Here's what I did instead.  I wound a skein into a ball and started knitting a shawl.  Sigh.  Sometimes I have the attention span of a flea.

Knit sea creatures

I'm knitting little sea creatures.  Ostensibly, these are for a zoology study session my kids are having.  Truthfully, I was just looking for an excuse to try some designs by Hansi Singh.

The purple one is a nudibranch, the other is a sea snail (modified from the garden snail from Amigurumi Knits).

Here's the sea snail giving me the eye.