Adaptable Cornelia

There! See how adaptable "Cornelia" is! It's just the most amazing pattern. I was playing around with the size 40 red thread after I made the size 20 ornament strap adaptation. It came out as a really nice little heart, so I put it in a ring. I dropped it on the table and it landed upside down. Oh -- wow! A tree, I could see a tree.

The green size 40 and some silver beads made a nice little tree. It needed a trunk, but as I just had a bag of necessities (I was visiting), I didn't have any brown. (Just kidding -- I don't actually own any brown. It's so brown!) I did have a shuttle with some ecru thread on it. Ta-da, a tree with an anemic trunk -- inside a ring of course, I'm making ornaments! And more ornaments. I did two more with little changes, like different bead colors and some different stitch counts.

Guess what happened when I turned the tree upside down? Yup -- an even better heart. I doctored this one so you can see it, too -- but I've not made a nice red one yet.

I think a combination of the second and third one will work out best if I decide to make more (and how can I resist?). Wouldn't these make great presents to fit inside a card? Of course, the post office would probably mangle 'em unless I use a padded envelope. (People who need padded cells ought to have lots of padded envelopes -- but they are sadly lacking in this household).

Making Ornaments

Cornelia by Iris Niebach (from Tatted Doilies) is one of my favorite patterns.
When the Bonneville Tatters Guild asked me to make another ornament or two for the guild submission to the Festival of Trees I was a little worried that I wouldn't have time to get something made. I've made other ornaments by adapting Cornelia, but that adaptation required quite a bit of tatting. This is what I finally came up with:
It's made of size 20 Lizbeth ecru. I wrapped it over the top and down the sides of a burgundy satin ornament. I had intended to make a couple of little motifs to put on the sides below the center of the strap, but there wasn't enough time. I didn't even get a picture of it. So I made two more. :) One is a nice Christmas Green and the other is Christmas Red both are size 40 Lizbeth thread. I had time to make the extra little motif for the sides for these.

Ice Crystal

November has been month for doing things I hadn't before. I've made one (yeah, just one) piece from Tatting Patterns and Designs by Blomqvist and Persson (Lucky Clover -- but I've done it a bunch of times). There are so many pretty patterns in this book, I finally decided I needed to make Ice Crystal. I've made some little icicle ornaments adapted from this pattern, but not the whole pattern.

When I was trying to decide what color to use, I finally reached dither-point. After dithering around for a while, I figured I'd just use all the colors. This is Ice Crystal in Rainbow colors. The thread is a size 80 DMC tatting cotton which my sister dyed for me. It measures just 5.25 inches (13.5 cm) across at it's widest point

Okay, it doesn't look like ice -- but it's certainly cheerful!

It's a Chicken!

Actually, it's not a Chicken -- it's a Cockerel Bookmark from Dianna Stevens' Animal Bookmarks: A Tatted Zoo.

It called for size 20 thread, but I started it in size 80. Ahhhhh, isn't that cute? Well, no actually it was very nearly tiny and sort of wimpy. I left of making the long bookmark tail and started over.

This is the result.

It actually is size 20! (Unusual for me, I generally just pick a thread I want to use and ignore what's called for -- ornery that way, I am). I used the Day and Night Rainbow my sister dyed for me on a DMC size 20 cordonet base. Not only was the pattern fun, the thread is great to work with. I do think I should have made the tail feathers a bit longer (though not so long as those on the size 80), but I'm just figuring this is an immature rooster.

Well, really. I thought it was size 20, really I did. Got looking back and decided that I really shouldn't scribble this stuff off the top of my head. It's actually a DMC size 30 Cébélia -- but is really is the Day and Night Rainbow. :)

Annalisa

Annalisa from Tatted Doilies by Iris Niebach, made with size 30 purple Cébélia.

I have had this book for about five years, and have made some of the patterns (notably Beatrice and Cornelia) a number of times. This Annalisa always looked way to scary. I got brave late in October and tackled it. I did a lot of retro-tatting, grumbling when I couldn't find my paperclip, and fussing, but got the whole thing done. I like it, and it wasn't really as difficult as I had expected.

It's been done for about two weeks, but I could not get myself to block it. It's still not blocked -- this is as it came off the shuttles. I know it will look better when I can finally bestir myself to block it!

Now I have to do the variations: Annamaria and Annarita. What fun, eh? (^_^)

Elizabeth's Giveaway!

Look at these! Aren't they pretty? Elizabeth is giving them away in honor of her 100th Etsy sale. If you'd like a chance to have these for your very own, jump on over to her blog and enter.

I just wish I could enter about 16 dozen times!

LadyShuttleMaker Giveaway

You really, really need to pop on over to Sherry's blog this morning and enter her Monday Mondo giveaway. It's a goodie today!!

Earrings

Yup. Earrings. I've been making 'em. I haven't been using a pattern, just Jon Yusoff's method for covering rings. There are four stitches over the cabone ring between each beaded ring. Oren Bayan metallic threads are the best I've ever used. That said, I must admit that the silver ones were made with DMC metallic. It takes a little longer and I have to work a little looser, but I like the look of the metallic threads. The multi-color and green ones have really tiny beads. I found a new bead store not too far from home, and it had all these really tiny seed beads. I think they are 15 or something like that -- I really can't read the codes on them. The best I could manage was to read the price. That wasn't really tiny. Sigh. They were worth it, though. You should see me when I drop one -- no, you shouldn't; it's too embarrassing. The blue beaded earrings are mine, the green ones are my sister's and the bottom two are for friends of my aunt (those two are garnering me a small remuneration -- enough to buy some more beads). Oh, the reason you can't see the hooks on most of these is that the are nylon hooks. I put beads on the shanks. The green beads barely fit and the blue beads were a total no-go, so my earrings have gold hooks.

State Fair

This post is going to look like a re-run of the county fair -- in fact, I'm using the same pictures, just changing the ribbons. If I wait until I can get all the stuff back together with the ribbons, I'm never going to get this done. There aren't 24 hours in a day any more. I'm certain something has happened to the physics or something and there are only about 6. But -- I digress -- the State Fair was held very nearly a month ago (September 10-20). I demonstrated tatting on four of those days -- three evenings from 6 to 9 and one day from 10 in the morning until 2 in the afternoon (but I took the whole day off work, lovely). Here are the pictures:
I ran out of categories in tatting and had to enter my tatting-covered purse in the "large bag" category. I'm not much of a seamstress, and I don't think they knew I used a worn-out pair of jeans on purpose. I did get a comment on it "Lots of Work!!" Well, yeah. It was interesting to see the difference between entering it in miscellaneous tatting in the County and entering it as sewing in the State (especially when it was the tatting that was new, not the purse). I'm going to be more careful about picking categories if I do this again!

The only new things I entered were a bookmark (there is a category just for tatted bookmarks!) and a "wearable motif". The bookmark is "Honor" from Sherry Pence's The Exquisite Collection of Tatted Butterflies with an added tail to turn it into a bookmark. The judges liked it. That was good, because I like it too. The wearable motif is my original pattern for a t-shirt decoration made with buttons. For this shirt, I made single diamond motifs to match and sewed them on the sleeves.
The State Fair gives money prizes. In the categories in which I entered, they pay $3.00 for a first place and $2.00 for a second place, third and fourth places get ribbons. I got 6 firsts, 2 seconds, and a fourth in Home Arts and 1 first in Creative Arts. I am a rich woman now. [uh-huh, as if] I got one check for $22.00 from Home Arts and a check for $3.00 from Creative Arts. Considering it cost me $11.00 to enter all that stuff, ending up with $25.00 felt pretty good. In the first flush of ...well, actually, greed... I thought maybe I'd get out the list of categories and start now to make something in every one. But then I noticed one was "tablecloth - tatting". Uh-uh, I'm not tatting a tablecloth! My sister suggested I purchase a small doll table and make a tablecloth for that. I don't think the judges are that liberal, really, I don't.

Holloversary Mystery Giveaway -- Aileen's Wicked Tats is de-stashing! Another place to make a comment and maybe get a goodie. Isn't this fun? She's got all the requirements right there, but be sure you make your comment by October 29 (maybe you turn in to a pumpkin if you don't??).