A Tragic End

I could hardly believe my eyes… as I got closer to the last repeat of the Butterfly Doily - the one that's been more than 2½ years in the making! - I realised, with horror, that it wouldn't fit!  Although everything was fine all the way through,  there must have been some discrepancy somewhere as the last butterfly wouldn't fit.  I could have cried.  Now, normally I would undo and fix but NOT THIS TIME!  This has not been my favourite tat by a long way but I just had to complete it once I got far enough into it.  The circumference on the last round is about 96 inches!!  That's a lot of tatting, and I had to refill my shuttles frequently.  I have no idea where I might have missed something along the way so that the last round wouldn't work out.  I knew though, that if I had to un-do and re-do anything on this particular piece, it would probably never get completed again.  I've just not enjoyed it enough.

So I made it fit.

Actually I could fit the last butterfly but what I was short of was a ring below to attach the second half of it.  I'm afraid in this case, I improvised and changed the bottom part slightly to make it fit in what I hope is a not-too-obvious manner.  If you examine the whole edge closely, you'll see it but I think at a glance, it's not glaringly obvious.  Phew!

Ok, enough of an introduction, here it is:

and here with a shuttle

for size reference

I couldn't remember how many balls of Lizbeth I used…

so I weighed my doily:  88 grams

(not much weight for all that work!)

so that 3½ balls of Lizbeth Mocha Light.

I'm certainly pleased I finally got to the end (even if not perfectly)

If just for that reason, I'm going to celebrate.

I even widened the columns of my blog for this post

so I could have one larger image of the completed piece.

It does look rather nice on this last photo.

Yes, you're right, my title was a tad over the top (I was just having a laugh and being a bit of drama queen!), obviously, it's not that tragic and I have a large piece of lace to show for but I wouldn't recommend this particular design for anyone else to tat.  After the second round of butterflies, I wasn't really enjoying myself and all those long chains kept misbehaving and needed a lot of coaxing into place.  I debated when I got to the last round whether I needed to change the stitch count slightly to try to get it to frill less.  In the end I went with what was written but in spite of all my efforts, it still doesn't lie flat properly, which is a shame… and then to get to the last butterfly and find that I couldn't attach that last chain…

Anyway, enough about it.  Thank you so much for cheering me along.  Your words of encouragement always mean a lot to me.  At last, it's done.  Dusted.  Time to move on.  Definitely happy about that.  :-)

Best wishes,
Frivole