Fascinating

A few weeks ago, just before our trip to the Steampunk convention, Wild Wild West Con, in Tucson, I started crocheting some accessories. I got the idea for them from  a post my mother-in-law called my attention to, of someone crocheting around a button and making a flower. Cute. Easy. Colorful. Then my imagination took off!

My first effort at a clockwork flower.

I had bought a tube of clock gears at the first Wild Wild West Con, knowing I could use them somehow, someway.  They are various sizes, and some are fairly small, and some have stems on one side or the other, so they can actually be kind of pokey. But I took the basic idea of crocheting around a button, and crocheted around one of the bigger gears instead. It was button sized, more or less. I used crochet cotton thread, and attached some smaller gears around the flower as well.

Well, my imagination went off!  It was pretty easy, as I had several colors of thread, and that tube of gears. But then I wanted more than just gears, so my friend Sara and I took a trip to Hobby Lobby, and I picked up some steampunkish bits and pieces, and continued crocheting.

Of course Sara got one...

By the time of the convention, I had a ziploc bag of them, and gave a few away, and wore one on my hat band. I put them on clips which seems to be handy for clipping to a pocket or hat band as well as your hair. Here are the ones I still have:

the finished and the unfinished

As you can see, I didn't just use gears for the middle of the fascinators. I found some metal buttons that seemed to work well, and even a little lock trinket. Ultimately, I liked a flower pattern with more that the five original petals, but I tried a variety of configurations. They reminded me of the snowflakes I crocheted oh-so-many-years-ago. For something quick and really pretty easy, I think they worked out well.

Are they steampunk? Well, I like them to be so my answer is yes. Not everyone may agree, and that is OK. What makes something steampunk? Well, it is Victorian (which crochet is), and whimsical, and something of a mixture of hard (like gears or skeleton keys) and soft. These were definitely fun!