Amazing Lace Challenge #6

Another week, another last-minute-ish entry to The Amazing Lace.
Challenge #6 is "to post a photo of your lace being proudly worn or displayed by the strangest, funniest, or most unlikely model you can find." For your viewing pleasure, may I present the Tina Shawl in its completed and cat-free glory.


It is shown with (clockwise, from top left) a model replica of Gondor from Lord of the Rings (I forget the scale but judging from the movie it's probably 1:1,000,000), a model sailing ship that has been falling apart ever since the day I assembled it, and 2 images of a Ford Model T, found here.

Quick update

Here is the blocked shawl! I think I'm going to go lock it up in a safe now to keep it away from the cats.

Just waiting

Here's the Tina Shawl being blocked! I'm going to leave it there until this afternoon or until I get nervous about the construction guys working on the house, whichever comes first. My apologies for the low-contrast photo.

Apparatus: 2 pieces of 8'x2'x1' insulation foam, strategically cut. 2 towels. 1 cheap tablecloth. 3 boxes of T-pins plus about 90 flower-head pins (about 150 pins total). 12 blocking wires. Partridge in a pear tree.
Time to pin everything down: Probably about 1.5 hours.
Time to psych myself up to block: a week.

I decided to wait a bit before embarking on another lace project this intense (sorry Theresa!). I do have a shawl on the needles (Pacific Northwest shawl from FiberTrends, in Misti Alpaca) but as you can see the other WIP are decidedly non-lacy:

Back: the alpaca shawl and Traveller's stocking #2 (back on the dpn after a brief stint on Addi circs)
Front: Sock with an identity crisis in Lorna's Laces and the beginnings of a tank top with cowl.

The yarn for the tank top is Hana from ArtFibers; I picked it up during my weekend in San Francisco. As for the sock...well, right now I'm making it into Grumperina's Jaywalker sock but it may have other things to say about that...it's already objected to being a Pomatomus and a plain ol' sock.

Coast to coast

Tunnel en route to the Marin Headlands.

I think I want to live in San Francisco.

We went there for a friend's wedding last weekend. We had spent the previous week trying not to melt in 100-degree weather and humidity. In SF we encountered pleasant sunshine, pelicans, hills, and the cool Pacific breeze.

The rental car company upgraded us to a convertible, so we spent most of the weekend driving around with the roof down, enjoying the sky, ooh-ing our way up the hills and EEEAAAGH!-ing our way back down. Drive-by photography was a breeze with (almost) no car roof getting in the way.

I couldn't help taking a picture of this contraption in the trunk (I have to admit, it seems nifty).

The wedding was in an orchid garden near the ocean, so between the ceremony and the reception we walked up the hill to look around.

On Sunday we hiked in Muir Woods with my husband's relatives. Did you know that redwoods can produce clones from tissue around their roots? It comes in handy when something catastrophic occurs, like a fire (note the dead stump in the middle).

I don't think I've felt this alive in ages. Now if only we could afford the housing there....

Unfortunately I missed Challenge #5 of The Amazing Lace because of the trip, but the weekend wasn't a complete write-off for the world o' knitting. Allow me to present a bound-off-though-still-unblocked Tina Shawl: