Inspiration Mondays: A Weekend Obsession

We got back from our weekend in the mountains today. It was a lovely weekend away, and I'm very sorry to see it finish. C'est la vie, mais je souhaite qu'il n'était pas (that's life, but I wish it wasn't).

Our first evening there, we went out for dinner at Murietta's Bar and Grill in Canmore. We'd passed it a number of times in our many trips there in the past, but this was the first time we ventured in. It is a pretty place, and I wish I'd taken a photo of the dining room. I was too busy enjoying my flatbread pizza!

The hostess was wearing a black outfit (as they tend to do, I guess) and over her shoulders, she was wearing a sheer black shawl. It was held closed by a pin that was decorated by a faux red rose. It was so pretty and simple that I couldn't stop thinking about it. I wouldn't mind having a pretty pin like that, I thought to myself.

After dinner, I stopped in the shop below and found some cute hair pins and fascinators with similar flowers and rosettes. I looked at them carefully, and then placed them back on the counter and left, my brain working and turning.

Back at the hotel, I picked up a pen and notepad and wrote:

• shawl pin made of hairdresser's hair separator
• rosettes made of fabric - old scarf?
• glue onto felt?

I'd been thinking before this trip that I wanted another shawl pin, and seeing the examples in the shop made me think that I could make something like it at home. I just needed to find something that wouldn't catch and would hold the shawl in place, like the hair separators that hairdressers use.

We got home today and unloaded the car. Rascal ran around the yarn, making sure everything was still as he left it, hubby went and worked on a few things on the computer while I made lunch. During lunch I said, "We'll need to get some eggs. Oh, and I want to go to the dollar store..."

I struck out at the dollar store. No hair separators, but every other kind of hair pin ever created. I got back into the car and said, "I'll need to go to Walmart."

And luckily, they had the very thing I was hoping for: hair separators with no teeth that would catch on a shawl.

This evening, I spent a couple of hours trying to recreate what I was seeing in my brain. As I worked, I realized that I am often in this position: feverishly working on something new that I am trying to figure out from an image in my head. Richard J. Leider in The Power of Purpose asks:

What are you doing when you are being yourself? What is it that you're doing when you lose all track of time because you are so engaged?

This is it. I am constantly forgoing meals and other duties to work on something with my hands. I'm turning things at all angles, often swearing and muttering under my breath, thinking that I'm finished when I've only just begun...

In the end, I ended up with two pins. This one was made from an old satin scarf that I was about to give away. I'm pretty happy with this, but I might try again to make a better one. I made the rosette and sewed it onto a piece of felt, which is then gluegunned onto the hair separator.

After I finished this I remembered this Frill Tape that my friend, Yumi, brought for me from Japan. I've had it for a while, and today was the first day I pulled it out with a project in mind.

After a few trials and watching a few videos about how to knit with tape like this, I came up with this:

I'm enthralled with it, mostly because I managed to make it after I totally wrecked the one before it with one false step right at the very end.

I'm also happy to take a step forward in trying to figure out who I am when I am being myself. Self-reflection is hard for me, but it's become a study of sorts for me. I'm glad to know exactly what I'm doing when I'm just being myself.

Now that I've figured that out, I'm off to get some dinner!