Sunday, January 29, 2012

More Elegant Tatting Gems

Yup -- been tatting, just not posting.  The computer has been in use -- it's school science fair season.  Wanna know how to clean a penny?  Never mind.

I've done some more of the beautiful snowflakes from Jon Yusoff's book Elegant Tatting Gems. I'm still making them all in red and green DMC size 80 tatting thread, but they're no longer in order.  I goofed on "Nilam" (joined a picot that shouldn't have been joined) and had to remake it -- goofed that one too (all the internal picots are too long) and now am going to have to find more red thread before I can finish any more at all. *sigh* 
Not that all these others were perfect right out of the gate:
As you can see, I had some problems with Lazuardi.  First, I wanted all of the round one loose threads out of my way -- I kept catching them in the rings I was making on the second round.  Second, I didn't put in magic threads, so I sewed in the ends.  Rather, I attempted to sew in the ends.  What I really did was break the thread on the first round.  I started over, but used the wrong size picot gauge and the long picots were just too long.  The last one looks pretty good, though.  When I was doing Kencana I made too many picots on the first red chain, so I did the same for all the others and then joined the bottom ones.  It makes the snowflake a lot rounder.  I did that one over too, and like the less rounded look of the original pattern much better.  Not too many problems with the other four on this page, but I'm not telling how many times I unpicked some of the rings!