Fantasia 2 again and Day 6

Finally! I made these two versions of Anemone Sylvestris from Iris Niebach's book Fantasia 2 during the past month or so. Both are from more of that stash of pink and green size 30 DMC Cébélia. Somehow I couldn't seem to stir myself to block them. They weren't horribly deformed, just rumpled looking. I'm so used to dampening things and using a zillion pins (stainless steel dressmaker pins!) I didn't think. When the light dawned, I dampened them and took 'em to the ironing board with a bit of clean, white cloth. Wow. Ironing works! The first one I made was the one with the five centers. I hadn't intended to do five -- just four. Uh-huh. The pattern required and odd number of centers, and it says so quite plainly. Five worked very well though. Reversing the colors, I worked the square one around one center. This one was actually harder to figure out and I had to watch the diagram much more closely. I started the same place -- with a chain off a paper clip. However, that didn't result in a simple ending the way the five center one did. I was doing a quite a bit of shuttle maneuvering, and had to (ahem) retrotat one of the elements about three times before getting all the picots properly joined. The final join is, as in the first one, rough. I need to work on that kind of chain join. There's gotta be a smoother way to work it.

DAY 6 -- and, yes, I did day five...just didn't scan it. Well, it's no longer Kokopelli on a unicycle but what it actually is, I can't imagine. Luckily, I don't have to because Jane knows! It's certainly fun to do this way.

The other thing I'm working on should be finished today. It's a Pretty Doily Tat-Along from Etatters. I worked it once, but found it too...er...hairy because I made all the picots too large. This time its totally bald -- no extraneous picots at all, just the joining bits. I'm not even certain I can ever block the first one -- way too many picots to manage quickly and I don't like it well enough to spend a lot of time! Ah well, it might look a lot better than I suspect if I do block it. I'll put that one in think-about-it mode. You know -- if you think-about-it long enough you never have to DO anything!