Design Challenge 2

Sharon's second image from the Design Challenge proved to be quite a challenge for me. The first one I made is just over 1/6 done -- with weird threads sticking out here and there. I was trying to use extra long picots by wrapping specified numbers of times around my one little picot-gauge-dowel. Talk about stringy -- besides it was yellow. Yeah. I pulled that off my Aero-style shuttles with a satisfying zzzzinnnng. I was running out of thread on the shuttles anyway. It's sitting on the arm of the chair looking forlorn -- and I don't care.
Starting over with DMC size 80 with plain red on one shuttle and a red variegated on the other shuttle, I thought maybe beads would cover the deficiencies in those long picots. Not quite, the yarn stitch holders I used were way too big and left too much bare thread. At that point, I lost track of the challenge image and wandered off somewhere into the ozone layer. Oh, well. This one would no way make a 6-sided snowflake anyway. It's not even an attractive 5-sided star. Poor limp thing didn't even want to settle into any proper shape on the blocking board. But here it is in all it's ...er... oddness.
Stubborn (me or the motif? -- could be either or both), I started again with green and yellow size 30 DMC Cebelia. Instead of regular chains I made lock chains to separate the repeats so they wouldn't try to curve. A few other minor changes in ds counts and picot size resulted in what I'm calling my (ta-da!) finished design. Those knobbies around the edge are an ...ummm... embellishment (yeah, that's what) to the challenge image. The large rings at the top of the lock chains need to have a bigger picot for joining so they're not so stressed when blocked, but it's done. The only really nifty thing is that it's all done in one pass so there's only one set of threads to hide at the end. It bears a passing resemblance to the challenge image ... doesn't it?

Now I have to go dig out my threads and extra shuttles for TIAS 4 -- thanks Sherry!