We shall see.

While I was tatting the motif in the previous post, I decided I should really finish stuff off properly; block it and tidy up the ends. There’s two reasons really – 1) it would give me a proper sense of achievement when I’d finished and 2) I wouldn’t end up with a pile of tatting sitting on my desk with the threads all waiting to be dealt with:

There’s all sorts in the pile. Mostly Mary Konior patterns, but also…

• a nice, basic star, which was an experiment in floating rings
• a triangle, which I’d seen others do, forgot to write the pattern down, but  successfully guessed while on the train
• two spare middles for the stars I made at Christmas
• A doodle I made up on the plane to Savannah, Georgia. (I’m based in the UK, it was a long flight).

Literally all-bar-one (a Mary Konior square design, which might be my favourite pattern of all time) need their ends weaving in. Ah – actually, there’s the one I posted the other day in there too – I take that back!

Anyway. I need to weave my ends in. And so the next challenge will be learning how to hide ends as I go. I’ve been putting it off for ages, but I should really learn. I might be an occasional crafter, but there’s occasional, and there’s just being a bit lazy!

In the mean time, I’m on my third attempt at this:

Another Mary Konior pattern, I really only started it because I’d learnt onion rings and thought it would be a good place to use them.
It wasn’t really.

I think it’s better the way Mary suggested – a ring in the centre and chains and floating rings on the outside. The  green one I screwed up because I added an extra ring and couldn’t find a nice way to get rid of it. The  white one, you can just about see on the left I screwed up because I should’ve switched shuttles for the middle rings, and if you don’t it looks all pointy and weird. So now, well, third time lucky? We shall see.

I’m trying to ignore the fact the second ring is smaller than the first. The thread is size 100 (or so they say – it doesn’t actually feel that thin to me) and it has a habit of twisting back on itself. This means that to close the second ring I had to give it a bit of a tug, and it shrank a bit. Oh well. I wont tell anyone if you don’t and we’ll see if we can get away with it.