The Voices In My Head Are Arguing

Earlier this year I was suffering from "tatter's block."  I had trouble finding any project I felt like doing, or that would hold my interest once begun.  A little voice in my head said, "you'd rather be spinning."  I held it at bay until I had managed to eke out enough patterns to apply to teach at Palmetto (yay! they accepted me), and then I got out the spindle.

I had this batch of mixed BFL from the Spinnery in Gatlinburg that I was eager to try.

I was having such a good time that I ordered some more from Etsy seller Beesybee.  (I am "spinning from the fold," long draw technique, in case anyone cares.)

The batches are quite similar, just differences in lighting.  They will look good plied together.  

And then, as I am about halfway through, the voices in my head say, "It's time to tat!  It's time to design.  You CAN produce a book this year!"

Dare I listen?  It's a little later than usual to start in on a book to be ready by Palmetto-time.  Can I pull it off?  Should I try? The voices make my head spin.

Designer's Faux Pas

I did that thing you're not supposed to do when designing.  I didn't write down what I was doing as I went along.  I thought I would get back to it while I still remembered what I was doing... and I didn't.  And I also tell myself I can always go back and count stitches, but I didn't take into account that I'm using very small, very pale thread.  Oops.  I hit on the solution to scan it and then blow up the picture real big. That helped... a little... maybe.

Later:  Hmmm...maybe next time, up the contrast with Photoshop too.

This Week's Project

This week's project, or rather the beginning of one, is another pattern from "Occhi - Tatting -  Frivolite Mustersammlung" by Susanne Rolf.  This intricate looking edging is actually not that hard to memorize, so I can take it with me without pulling out the pattern to consult all the time.  It tends to curl up while making, but isn't too hard to press flat.

The thread is a discontinued Flora size 50, and the colors in real life are more pale, nice and subtle.

This is intended to go on a hankie some day.

March Madness

Redcoats:  235

Patriots:  0

After the battle reenactment for the 235th anniversary of the Battle of Guilford Courthouse, we found ourselves walking beside a troop of Continental Regulars.  One of them looked over at us, gave a big grin, and said, "We'll get 'em next time."

Sqaures

Trying to keep my hands busy, here are 4 squares, pattern by Susanne Rolf in her book, "Occhi - Tatting -  Frivolite Mustersammlung."  (She also publishes under the name Susanne Schwenke.)  She designs very pretty patterns, many with some block tatting.  In all her books, each pattern has a diagram, and is also written out in German.  I worked from the diagram without trying to translate the text, and it worked out well.  If you want to try to translate foreign patterns, Georgia has links to tatting terms in various languages HERE.

Working in size 20, each individual square is about 2 1/2 inches across.  I haven't blocked it, just lightly pressed.

Thank You, Dora

You may know I have a love/hate relationship with Pinterest.  On one of the good days, a picture of this sheep led me to

http://doraexperiments.blogspot.com/    

There's a tab at the top to click for her patterns.

And there I found the pattern for this cat as well. Aren't they both adorable?  Thank you, Dora, for sharing.

By the way, instead of adding the tail at the end, I worked it as a floating chain so I wouldn't have another cut and tie.

I made the sheep with white pearl cotton and the cat with Lizbeth color 611.

A Sweet Return

Yeah, I fell off the face of the earth again.  I had some real world issues, and some more real world issues, followed by some procrastination, followed by more procrastination when I realized I didn't have any recent projects to talk about.

I decided to get back into the swing of things with the project from last week's Online Class, the Sweet Heart Valentine by Pop Lenuta Maria, with help from Karen Cabrera.  You can see the pattern HERE.  Muskaan made some beautiful 2 color versions and wrote about them HERE and HERE.

I started off and quickly ran into trouble.  My large rings on the backside layer wanted to twist and curl and the picots were getting too bunched up.  This sort of thing happens sometimes when there is too much tension closing a very long ring.  Usually, I can fix this by closing the ring part way and then loosening up the scrunched up part before finishing the close.  This wasn't working very well for me this time, maybe because the 2 layer effect made it harder to get to the early part of the rings.  Or maybe it was just me that day.  Also, I was working with 2 colors, with a twist between rings, but I didn't like the way it gave color blips between rings.  I cut that one off the shuttles and tried again.

I asked Muskaan's advice since her hearts looked so nice, and she said she did not twist the colors between rings, so I quit that.  I also tried adding a join between the large rings on the back side to see if that would make them lie flatter, and decreased the number of picots. Well, that was better. Muskaan had warned that some bare space between rings was recommended, but I must have not made my bare spaces big enough because my motif curled up quite a bit and required some stern blocking.


So then I thought, working the pattern as orignially written, with all the rings made with the same shuttle might create the proper spacing.  This was much easier to flatten.  It curled up just a bit, but it was easy to mash down just a little and give it a quick press with the iron.

If I ever work this again, it might be a good experiment to make it with 2 colors, and work chains of a few ds between rings.