Tag Archives: shetland lace

Creator appreciation⤴

from

During the month of August I will be participating in Blaugust, a month long blogging challenge.

From what I’ve read about this week’s challenge, it seems that this was originally aimed at giving appreciation for games developers. Well, I don’t really play games or like them, but I have a huge amount of appreciation for anyone who creates things that I do enjoy. Often I’d use this type of post to wax lyrical about DS106 and the Daily Create, but with my whole month of Blaugust being spent blogging my responses to the TDC I wanted to take this post in a different direction.

As anyone who knows me will tell you, I am an avid knitter. I always have at least one pair of socks on my needles – this is my current pair (they’ll be an Xmas present for my sister, the Rev Polly):

Socks
Socks flickr photo by NomadWarMachine shared under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license

Knitting socks like these are great for times when I just need to keep my hands busy, but they’re not challenging. So as well as socks, I always like to have a bigger project on the go. Every year I’ll make my OH an aran jumper – the same pattern every year, as he likes it a lot. Here’s the Xmas 2025 version:

Aran Jumper
Aran Jumper flickr photo by NomadWarMachine shared under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license

And, over the last few years, I’ve started to really enjoy knitting Shetland Lace in very fine yarn. Here’s a hap that I made for a colleague’s first baby recently from a traditional patterns:

Hap on stretcher
Hap on stretcher flickr photo by NomadWarMachine shared under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license

And a stole I made for myself, from a pattern by a Shetland designer called Elizabeth Williamson:

Roerwater Stole
Roerwater Stole flickr photo by NomadWarMachine shared under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license

So my creator appreciation is for the Shetland women who knitted the haps and handed the designs down to us, and to the modern designers who keep the craft alive.

And also to my OH, who made me the hap stretcher.

Add AI to an Unexpected Product⤴

from

During the month of August I will be participating in Blaugust, a month long blogging challenge.

HapGPT
HapGPT flickr photo by NomadWarMachine shared under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license modified with File:AI-Check.svg wikimedia commons image by Subilan shared under CC0 and additional text

Today’s TDC asks us to:

Look around and find an everyday object that could use some AI added to it. Create an advertisement image that extols its virtues in the new age.

I chose a photo of a Shetland Lace Hap I made earlier this year from a traditional pattern, streched out on the hap stretcher that N made for me. I then downloaded the  AI-Check image linked in the TDC and used PPT to add it to the image. I wrote some text in the spirit of the example Alan had shared, and added that to the slide:

HapGPT is here.

Shetland Lace Haps have been made by hand from traditional patterns since the 19th Century, with patterns passed down by word of mouth.
Now new technology can take all of the pleasure out of knitting.
Expect mangled instructions and patterns that do not work.
All for a very reasonable monthly fee of £300 pcm

Then I screen shot the slide and uploaded it to Flickr so I have it in my files and can use Alan’s Flickr attribution bookmarklet (which saves me seconds as it does it all for me). The result is at the top of the page.