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

38 Down, 18 To Go!

I am pleased to have finally got around to picking this up again.  It was a shame to have done all that work on it and then to leave it abandoned for so long…

If I'm honest, it's not my favourite design which probably explains why I didn't rush to complete it.  There are LOTS of chains and tiny rings which means that it has a tendency to "misbehave".  I've tried to press it as I went to keep it in shape but I can see it will be a nightmare to wash!

Also, if it was me, I would have made the butterfly motif with just two little rings at the top rather than three.  I know it's a stylised butterfly but it would have looked more "butterflyish" with either two small rings (for the tip of antennae) or one small ring with long picots (for a head with antennae).  Don't you think?

Still, I can finally see the end in sight of this really long-term project (I can't find the original post at the moment but I think I started this - I'm embarrassed to say! - two years ago?)  I now have 38 of the last round butterflies completed and 18 more to go.


Best wishes,
Frivole

31st of October

The blanket is done!  It seemed like a really long-term project when I started this a few months ago (in July).  My son had asked for this blanket to be even longer than the first one I'd made (the granny square one) so the strips had 100 repeats.  The finished blanket ended up measuring 175cm x 140cm, plenty enough to cover two people sitting cosily on the sofa together.

I tried to use up every last bit of wool I had.  I had some dark blue left over after finishing the strips so I used that to crochet four more rows of squares all around the blanket and then added a little colourful edge by making one more row of single crochet in olive green and one in turquoise.  I think that finishes it off nicely.

I like the nice scalloped shape that you get with these strips…

more zig-zag than scallop even!

And today of course is...

Halloween!  This is not as popular in Europe as it is in America and there will be no trick-or-treating where we are at the moment, but I still like to celebrate it in a small way… and my particular favourite thing is pumpkin-lanterns.

We brought a couple of small pumpkins with us... but were delighted to be offered two giant pumpkins by our farmer neighbour!  The colours and shapes are wonderful.  One of them as been cut by now and made into soup and will also be made into potato-carrot-pumpkin mash tonight… and there will still be loads left!

We continue to enjoy beautiful warm weather today - hardly feels like autumn at all.  The other project I took with me is this very long standing WIP:  the butterfly doily.  I've not touched it for months and months!  But now I've picked it up again, I'm making good progress.  Only showing you a little bit of it, I'll save the full view for when it is finally completed!

To finish, here's one of my pumpkin-lanterns:

Happy Halloween!

Best wishes,

Frivole

Last Round! - Butterfly Doily

I can hardly believe it but I've finally made it to the last round of the Butterfly Doily!  

Here are the first three butterflies of the 18th and last round...

only 53 more to go!!

Best wishes,

Frivole

Penultimate Round!

I'm getting there!  I was travelling again this weekend so the butterfly doily accompanied me.  I completed the last few repeats of the "long chains" row and have started on the "frilly split rings" row.

I do love working on larger pieces like this.  It gives me great satisfaction though I couldn't tell you exactly why.  I like feeling the weight of all that lace and seeing it draped across my lap as I work... 

Best wishes,

Frivole

Yet More Butterfly... Ornamental Mat?

Still looking for another word for "doily" - anyone has suggestions?

Travelling means lots of time sitting on airplanes or waiting in airports.... which means.... tatting time!  I managed to just about complete the next two rounds of my butterfly table decoration (only a few repeats left on this row).  It now measures 21.5 inches across.  There are two rows left.  This piece was the only tatting I took with me.

Here it is, on my ironing board.

The last row was another with long chains

which unfortunately need pressing into place

to get them to behave!

Ironing it also got me to notice that I'd made a small mistake on the previous row!  Oh Dear.  But there will be no cutting and repairing I'm afraid, those rounds are just too long to remake!  The mistake will remain and become part of the "personality" of the piece I've decided.

Best wishes,
Joëlle

Ambitatterous? Moi? Mais Pourquoi Pas!

Ambitatterous...  a neat expression for those who tat with either a needle or a shuttle.

I like the look of interlocking rings.  As most people know,  I'm a shuttle tatter, but my previous experience of making interlocking rings with a shuttle was not enjoyable.  They have a life of their own when made with a shuttle and I got them wrong as many times as I got them right!  After some trial and error, it still seemed a mystery to me when they did work out!

Last night, I was inspired to have another go and thought "why not make the interlocking part with a needle and then carry on with a shuttle?"  Interlocking rings with a needle are easy.  So this is what I did for the motif above.  I made five interlocking rings and then used a shuttle and ball to complete the following two rounds.  I just improvised as I went along.

I'm no expert with the needle and I think I need to firm up those centre rings a bit more so they keep their shape better when making the next rounds but I like the overall look of this. 

So why not use both needle AND shuttle if you can?

And another brief update on the Butterfly doily (are you fed up with it yet?):  I'm now more than halfway through round 15... it has 112 repeats, so that's 336 small rings, two thirds of which are split rings!  It currently measures nearly 20 inches across.

Best wishes,

Frivole

Engineering Improvements & Butterfly Doily

Still happy with my home-made swift and how much quicker I can now wind my HDTs, I did make a small improvement to the design though.

I wanted my swift to come apart so it wouldn't take too much space and I could store it away easily.  So I wanted the two blades to stay as two parts and I had just pinned them together when in use.  Today, I used my swift again and thought I could improve...  I added some pieces of cardboard so that the top blade can now slot down into the bottom blade.

I'm happy now.

Works well and stores away neatly.

And an update on the butterfly doily.  Inspired by Fox's perseverance with her own large project, I am now working on row 14 which is lots of small split rings so it's a bit slow-going.  The doily now measures 19 inches across (or 48cm).  There are 4 more rows left after this one.  I only work on this project here and there, not continuously,  so it may be a while yet before it is finished!

The next round is also lots of small split rings and the doily is now so large that it does take a long time to go all the way around!  And it's starting to frill at the edges again so it will need a bit of pressing soon.  I have to admit that I don't like tatting designs that require a lot of coaxing into place like that!  The long chains are troublesome because they need to be flattened into a sharper arch than would be naturally achieved.  Not one I'm going to want to be washing too often - too much work to iron it flat again afterwards!

Best wishes,

Frivole

Another Primrose, More JS, and Butterflies

After tatting Primrose by Rosemarie Peel which I wanted to try because it used a safety pin to hold the picots and I was curious...  I remade the motif using a centre ring first instead and then joining to very small picots.

Here are both motifs, side by side.  What do you think?  My conclusion is that I'm not sure it's worth using the safety pin which I found fiddly to work with.  Maybe, the chains lie a bit more easily next to each other with the pin but that's about it.  The second flower looks nearly the same to me and was much easier to make by tatting a centre ring of single picots separated by one double stitch and then carrying on with the chain-ring-chain-join of the second round.  Simple.

In my hastiness I forgot to carry on and make the tail on the second motif.  It was too late, I had cut the threads.

Then I decided to try another motif from Jan Stawasz's book "Tatted Treasures.  As you may know, squares always appeal to me so it had to be this one.  In the pattern, he joins these to plain ring squares which I don't like as much so I was thinking I might try joining a few of these together.  I think they'd look interesting.  Not so fond of this colour though (another DMC Babylo).

I'm always fascinated by how different a square motif looks whether viewed on its side or on its point - don't you think?

And finally, Umintsuru said in a previous post that she'd like to see the butterflies better.  So here's a close-up that shows the 1st round of butterflies and a bit of the second round.  They are similar but slightly different.  Personally, I think the eye is distracted by the round that follows the butterflies.  If it was me, I'd have made a more full band to enclose the butterflies rather than those long chains which mean that you loose the shape of the butterflies a the top, I think.

Just realised, looking at the photos that I said above I wasn't fond of the colour for the Jan Stawasz motif and my doily looks the same colour!  But the doily is made in Lizbeth Mocha Light and in real life does look different than the DMC Babylo colour which is darker, browner and with a strange pink tinge to it.

I finally updated my patterns page.  I was trying to add to it yesterday and accidentally erased a big chunk of it and it took me AGES to find all the photos again and put back all the links.  The layout is still a bit weird as the images keep jumping about the place and wanting to misbehave for some strange reason I don't understand.  But now all patterns and all links are there.

One last thing to say for today:  I'm all excited, I've finally had a taker for tatting lessons!  A friend is coming over on Tuesday and I will show her how to tat.  I hope it goes well, and she takes to it!

Best wishes,
Frivole

Rose Bonbon

This little motif on Renulek's blog caught my eye a while ago.  She has quite a few motifs like that available on her blog (thank you Renulek!) as well as the larger doilies many people have been making lately.

This is the first round:

And the completed motif:

Kind of pretty and frothy isn't it?

Makes me think of candy floss...

And... I FOUND IT!

I was getting quite concerned that this butterfly doily (from the "Tatting from Burda" book) had gone missing for weeks (months even!).  I thought I'd looked everywhere for it (but obviously I hadn't) and finally found it this morning.

It is now so big,  I have to put it on the floor to photograph it.  It currently measures 48cm (19in) across.  I'm not too happy with all the long chains that are in this design.  They need to be pressed into place or they "frill".  So this is not a doily I'm going to enjoy washing too often.  I've now put so many hours into it that I feel I ought to finish it... but I'm having a bit of a Fox moment I think (as she was having with her honey napkin)... luckily I've not had to cut any bits off (though there was some untatting going on in the last butterfly row) but I keep debating whether I like it enough!  I'm currently on round 14.  There is a smaller option that ends on round 16 - so just two more and I'd be done... but there also the GRAND version which ends on round 18 with a final round of butterflies...  will I make it?

As you can imagine, with such a large circumference (about 1m60 or 64in!!), it now takes quite a while to tat just one round.  And I get so easily distracted by all the other small things I can tat quickly!

Best wishes,

Frivole

Butterfly Doily Progress

I've been making progress on this... slowly but surely.  The second butterfly round (with 28 butterfly repeats) took me a while to complete.  And it's not a pattern to tat when you're distracted, I've had to do more un-tatting than I care for (which is NONE really! :-)

I was tempted to change the next round because I feel that the following round (which I'm most of the way through) and which is the same as the round after the first butterfly row detracts from the butterflies in my opinion.  Those long looped chains make them loose their definition - do you know what I mean?  I thought about repeating the same round as below the butterflies instead, thinking this would "frame" them better... maybe?  But then I thought it might mean I would have to change all the other rows so then I wasn't so sure I wanted to tackle such a challenge just now.

The only good thing is that if I decide to do the largest doily, it will end on a butterfly row (as it does now, temporarily).  This doily is now larger than my largest doily so far which was one of the two Jan Stawasz doilies I've completed.  

We like?

A few more rows to go!

Best wishes,

Doily Progress

Yes, this is still going on in the background.  I must keep the interest up to get to the end...  This is now the second butterfly round.  It is very similar to the first but slightly different.

Those long chains are still annoying me a bit with their unevenness but hopefully they'll blend in more once the whole thing is done and I've pinned and pressed them.

My head is bursting with ideas and I've got so much I want to do... it's just finding the time for it all!!

Hope you're all having a great weekend.  The sun was shining at last today after weeks of rain so it really cheered me up.

I'm adding this paragraph one last time:  don't forget to check out the Marie Smith's Split Chain Post (two posts down) if you've not seen it - I know some people use this technique already but if you've not tried it and don't like split chains, have a go with this method, I'm sure you'll find it easier.  Interestingly, someone has just posted about this method at In Tatters which they found through Jane Eborall's blog - I didn't know she had Marie's method in pictures so you can check that out too if you like.

Best wishes,

Butterfly Doily Progress

Here are the few more rows I have done on the doily.  The long chains needed steaming into place and only really behaved after I tatted the rows of small rings.  I like the rows of small rings but am not completely happy with the two previous rows; due to the shape of the butterflies, the chains look unevenly spaced...

Still, I've got this far, I'll soldier on.

And now I'm going to have a teeny-weeny rant if you'll allow...  I've just been awarded a third "thumbs down" on one of my tatting videos (no, actually two on one and one on another).  And I can't help it:  it bugs me!  Why is it that people give you a thumbs down on videos (I mean I can see it on some videos but tatting ones?)  I wish people had to tell you WHY they dislike your videos when they click on that thumbs down box, so easy to do.  It seems to me there can be nothing offensive or unpleasant enough about my tatting videos that people would wish to mark them down?  Is there?   I know I should not worry about it but it does bug me a little...  What can I say, I'm a sensitive soul...

End of rant.

Happy Tatting!

Best wishes,

I'm Back! - Last of Easter...

I know Easter has come and gone now... but as I was away for it, I still want to show you the eggs I made to decorate our Easter table.

Motif 23

(I'm counting all eggs as ONE... this challenge is going by too fast!)

I just used some vintage edgings and winged it...  Counted the motifs that fitted around the wide part of the egg and made some "ends" matching the number of repeats and then joined them with criss-cross threads.  I was quite pleased with how they turned out.  Might try to find some white eggs for next year.  Funnily enough they can be difficult to find here in the UK.

Once the eggs were done I was wondering what the next project should be...  I'd taken some of my new books away with me to enjoy perusing at my leisure and fancied the look of this doily from the book "Tatting from Burda" (Lacis Publications).

Here is a progress photo:

Motif 24 of 25-motif challenge

Tatted in Lizbeth 20, "Mocha Light"

I've done a few more rounds since I took this photo

so will have more to show you soon.

Now I've been very naughty and sneaked off to do this blog post when I should be unpacking and getting organised for the start of the week tomorrow!  Many emails to answer and matters to be dealt with but that will be for the morning.

Best wishes,