Goggle Update

Snow goggles, a little farther along.

I've been making some slow progress on the snow goggles. Last Friday, I got hit by this flu that's been going around the province and lost the weekend and the first half of this week. I've slowly been getting back into a work routine, but I'm still not 100 percent. I was very grateful for the two Plans and Profiles interviews that showed up in my inbox on Friday and Monday mornings so that I wouldn't have to think about blog topics on those days.

Spruce, with narrow triangular eye slits

The goggles on the left are the ones that I'm making for the Ontario order. They are based on the Wapusk National Park goggles that I was asked to reproduce for Park's Canada in 2010. They are nearly done here, I just have to braid some artificial sinew for the straps. In these photos, they are threaded with cotton twine to test them out, but I want to give them a more natural look.  The artificial sinew is a good visual match for real sinew but will be a little more durable, as the client requested.

This is the original artifact and the reproduction pair that I made in 2010.  The original goggles are very dried out and in some places its tough to tell what elements were part of the design and what changes happened to the goggles through weathering.  The eye slits on the artifact are actually narrow triangles, rather than flat rectangular slots. This may be a result of weathering or it may have been part of their design.  In 2010, I made rectangular eye slots, but this time around, I'm going with more triangular slits.

 Photo Credits: Tim Rast