Oh! Colonel Mustard, in the closet, with the letter opener! No, wait, wrong game. ;)
And the finished fan.
It takes a pretty special sort of crazy to walk past a display of fancy office desk crap (letter openers, pens, lampshades, business card holders, etc) and say, Hey! That would be a great fan! (And you can just imagine the look on my mother's face when she walked past to see me "fanning" myself with a letter opener to see if the handle was about right.) I bought the lampshade and the letter opener, took them home, admired them, then put them in a box... which is where they remained for a year and change.
The fan uses the complete letter opener as it's base. There are two shaped pieces of plastic canvas sewn securely over this - they're roughly trapezoids, with the skinny bit towards the bottom. The feathers are sewn to the plastic canvas. They were rather nicely curled at the get go, but much of the curl came out after I used the fan on a rather humid day. I detached all the cute little carved pieces from the lampshade, and used them to make a fancy covering for the bottom halves of the feathers. They are wired to each other, and I think they should be sewn down at some point in the future, because they came a little loose after I had been using the fan for a while.
Still, it looks like a fan, and it works like a fan, so I declare it a fan. The moral of the story is that a workable fan can be made from anything with a good handle, plastic canvas, some feathers, and a few decorative elements.... So go nuts! :)
