A maple leaf for Canada Day. What can I say, maybe next year I’ll knot a beaver or a moose. 8)

So, about halfway through, I ran out of the copper wire I was using. I could have gotten more, but I had a spool in the same gauge of magnet wire, which also happened to be reddish. Reddish, festive and xmas-y, although it wouldn’t go very well with the green and purple I was using before, so I changed the base cord colour to white. I was going to use some pink too, but forgot as I got into the flow of construction. The final knot including the hanging thread is in the picture to the left, and to the right is the knot in it’s gift packaging (little organza bags from eBay).

As usual around the winter festive season I start thinking of stars and snowflakes. I had an 8 pointed star/flower in mind that I had prototyped last year, but as I developed the idea (add more bling/zing), it had less of a star aspect to it. I still think it’s quite ornamental though, and simple enough to put into production considering a late-ish start (teacher gifts for 3 kids including a whole host of extracurricular activities, even missing some that finish in early-mid December still leaves 12-14 teachers/coaches).

I meant to start last year with this series of knots, but I lost them in the fall move. Being one of those people, I stewed and searched instead of just retying them until late 2009. Of course, when I had retied 1.5 letters I then found the originals. Like wearing a rain coat to ensure that it won’t rain that day, I should have started retying sooner. 8)

The Cherry Blossom Festival is a strange event with no fixed date. It’s not even like a solstice or something related to the lunar calendar, it’s when the cherry blossoms decide to fall on a given year. Vancouver’s Cherry Blossom Festival is officially designated as March 28 - April 24, at least this year (2009), but on my street, the flowers hadn’t fallen even by the last day of April. That said, it’s entirely possible that the trees I had my eye on weren’t cherry trees at all. My grasp of things botanical is fairly weak as befits the owner of a black thumb of death.