Is it Fair?

I won't know until next week. Yesterday we packed our oxygen tanks and headed out to the Equestrian Center and County Fair Grounds to enter lots of things. (We have to pack the oxygen because the place is soooooo far out in the valley the air is thin [thus speaketh an east-bench snob].) I entered two things in every tatting category available, and one in "bags". My sister entered her crocheted baby blankets, shawl, and kitchen sets. They had a difficult time with her tie-dyed items. We thought they belonged in decoration on a pre-made item, but they thought she should enter them as wearable art over in the creative arts section. They finally let her enter her sheets in home arts but sent her to creative arts with her union-suit jammies and baby onsie. The girls entered things too. I think I should win all the marbles -- but then, I lost my marbles years ago and am always hoping to replace them. We shall see. I'm not worrying about it, though. There was no entrance fee, and I don't think there are monetary prizes either. This is just practice for the state fair. These are the earrings I entered (of course, I displayed them differently for the fair:

Weekend Tatting...

We had a 3-day weekend due to a state holiday. Wow! I tatted all weekend -- look what I made:

I've tatted a shed! Okay -- it was a large project so I had a lot of help.

Huh? What do you mean?

Oh, yeah. I guess it's not tatted after all. How sad, and I worked so hard on it.

Actually, it was one of those no time for tatting weekends, but we have a new non-leaky, non-rusty home for the lawn mower and snow blower, the bicycles and wiggle cars, and the snowshovels and gardening implements. Now all we have to do it get the girls to paint the boards around the outside and put in the little brick entrance way (made from the bricks that came off the old chimney when we remodeled the house). That can wait for a bit -- I'm not doing any more manual labor in 102 F weather!

'Nother Modification

Our assignment in the Design-Tat course was to take a snowflake pattern and adapt it into a heart. I used my own pattern (because I already had it in my drawing program). If this looks familiar -- well, it should! This is based on the same snowflake as the butterfly in the previous post. The first incarnation just wasn't working at all, so I cut it off the shuttles. It needed something lower between two of the points, but certainly not the upside-down overly-long chain that I started with. The first complete heart doesn't look too bad, but didn't dip down enough at the top to suit me. Back to the drawing board. With a change in the top and the addition of a couple more little rings, it looked more heart-like to me. This time I worked it in blue Cebelia size 30, because I didn't want to use up ALL my red thread before I got to the final one. It worked, so I was happy and redid it in the nice red Lizbeth size 20. That would have worked better if I hadn't make a goofy right in the beginning. I had to cut that off and start over -- then I ran out of thread at the end. Piffle. Next time I do this I think I will have to use smaller thread to fit enough on my Aero shuttles, or break down and use those two little clovers I bought.

Oh -- I forgot to say that it is worked in one continuous round. That's why I ran out of thread on the shuttles!

Butterfly Exchange

New butterfly, but not really a new pattern. This is an adaptation of the snowflake I designed from the post "Flake-y Tatting" earlier in this blog. This is about the third, or fourth incarnation of the butterfly, and it finally suited me. There are still other possible alterations or additions that I'm going to try. First, though, I need to get this version diagrammed and written down. I'm pretty lazy when it comes to that. I usually keep a piece and just make more by looking at it. That's not really all that efficient, though.

Anyway...

Once it looked like a reasonable butterfly to me, I added forty-bazillion beads to create this turquoise butterfly for the InTatters June Butterfly Exchange.

This butterfly is made with Lizbeth size 20 thread and measures almost 5.25 inches wide (13.5 cm) and 3 inches tall (4 cm).

Betsee Annie and Brenna Annie

Betsee Annie and Brenna Annie are looking for new homes. Cyndi's Distinctive Creations is having a give-away, and the winner will get to choose one of these adorable hand-made dolls. I don't do a lot of give-away entering, but my niece would dearly love one of these. Aren't they cute?

Donation Ornaments

Finally! Picture -taking not being my forte, it took me a while to get out the camera and snap a photo of these ornaments.
(Okay, shoot off about a dozen in hopes one of them would come out unblurry)
This is another attempt at items to be donated for the Festival of Trees. The thread is right (size 20 ecru Flora); the ornaments are the question. I have no idea if this is the right color. Maroon is such a subjective color, don't you think? At any rate, I'll trot these out for the July meeting (because the June meeting is this Saturday and I'll be on vacation -- wheeee!). Somebody will either say they are the right color or they won't. It doesn't matter, because I can always find a home for ornaments! These are both covered in my own split ring pattern. I've got it written down somewhere, but it needs diagrams. Thanks to Sharon Briggs' Design-Tat course, I now know how to do that -- and will once I dig my Roundtuit out from under everything. :)

Still Ringing

Inspired by Jon Yusoff's wonderfully beautiful earrings, these are made from a bit of leftover size 20 Lizbeth thread. They have nylon hooks, which don't have the beads on the shank yet -- they didn't show up in the scan, so I cut 'em off this image. Next time I try this, I'm going to add some beads -- that'll make 'em more attractive, right?

I've been working on other things, but don't have pictures of some and the rest are for an exchange, so I can't show that either.

One Ringy-Dingy, Two Ringy-Dingy

Rings of all sizes -- cover 'em up!

Using adaptations of the center-ring snowflake from an earlier post, I've been covering rings like a mad fool. I've made two of these using Flora size 20 ecru thread (which is acceptable for the Festival of Trees), two with Day and Night Rainbow thread (a size 30), and one with Lizbeth Christmas thread (a red, green and white size 20 colorway). My dad has one of the rainbow ones, and the Christmas thread one. Hey! When he says he likes 'em he's stuck with them! I happened on two sleeves of bangles in a bargain bin, one is just silver-color and the other is silver and shades of green. I've got two hundred bangles to cover -- that's a lot of ornaments!

Not just ornaments, either. With a little more adaptation, the pattern can fit into these smaller hoops for earrings. I need to work on sizing (and counting, apparently) but these are for my sister's birthday -- tomorrow! They are made from the shades of green size 80 thread she dyed for me. You know, they'd look better if I had photographed them instead of squashing them in the scanner, because they bow out from the outer ring a bit. If she wore necklaces, I'd make a bigger one for a pendant. It's a thought for another time.

Ring Flake

See, ecru isn't nearly so interesting. Of course, this is a little busy looking, but seen "live" it's really very nice -- not too busy at all (I think it's the shadows in the picture). This is "Midnight Escape" (DMC size 80 ) thread and an (as yet) unnamed snowflake pattern around a covered ring. Once it was done, I decided to practice that covered ring thing some more, so I fastened it to a covered silver bangle. That worked -- so it had to have a hanger. The only problem is that's it's slightly too big for the bangle. I'm going to solve that by drying it over one of my niece's little rubber balls. Right now, it bows out from the bangle anyway, so I'm going to encourage that. I'm going to make more, with a change in stitch counts to see if I can get it to stretch side-to-side without the bow.

Flake-y Tatting

Waiting for inspiration, sketching, figuring, fussing, doing, re-doing, waiting for further inspiration, fussing some more. I really have been doing something, it just doesn't look like much! Since I've been so lax about blogging what I'm doing, I'll just dump it all in here at once.
First, Bonneville Tatters is donating a Tree to this year's Festival of Trees (those are Christmas trees for a local children's charity). It's being done in maroon and ecru and is intended to look Victorian. (Personally, I would have done a Tattycat tree -- white with rainbow snowflakes!) I've done nothing maroon, but will be donating this snowflake from the last pattern I worked out. It is made of size 30 ecru Cebelia. Of course I'm going to be working on some other stuff, too. This is just the bare minimum start. It's just soooooo hard for me to tat in ecru. I'm always convinced I've made a dirty spot (because I carry it all over the place) that is never going to come out. If you see one on this snowflake, don't tell me!

As for the fussing and figuring, I saw this bit of machine embroidery and thought I might be able to make it into a tatted snowflake. The pattern I drew out looked really great. Ummmm...I couldn't tat it the way I drew it. There were too many disconnected open bits and all the little hearts had to be done separately (lots of ends to hide). I couldn't get the shape even close, except by using lock chains, and they don't look quite right -- well, not as I had invisioned this thing looking, anyway. It needs a lot of work. I've set it aside for now and am thinking about it. This test piece was made in Opera size 10 cream thread. I didn't weave the threads in very well, but had to do something with them to see if this looked even halfway interesting. It does, but I couldn't get six points in, so it's no snowflake! I'm thinking about it, because i do like that center star.

Finally, this one was also from a bit of machine embroidery. It didn't end up looking much like the embroidery flake, but it pleases me. The first test of the drawn pattern didn't work well at all. It's SCMR connected by chains. Right, those don't have a lot of substance and the center shape is all weird. The second try turned out pretty good, but was a pain to do. It has a central ring with 11 picots and one mock picot to work out to the round with the SCMR and spacing chains. It works fine and doesn't look too bad, just a bit gobby at the center. So, for the third incarnation, I tried out covering a bone-ring (which is actually plastic). Since this is the first time I'd tried covering a ring, I just tied the threads together so I could work out how many stitches would cover the ring. Hey, I guessed right and put the little picot gaps in the right places too. How weird is that? Then I had to deal with those thread ends and the knot where I tied my two shuttles together. There's a lumpy spot right at the base of one of the arms. The fourth one is the one I will be donating to the Tree. I still have work to do on getting the ring covered evenly, and need to figure out how to do rings at the edges, but I think these little rings are nifty. Oh, this flake is made of size 30 Cebelia, as well.