Happy Easter!

Happy Easter...and yes it is actually Easter today! That makes 2 holidays in a row that I have posted my holiday project right on time! Craziness I know.

These were actually pretty fun to make.  It is a super simple pattern that comes from the book Tatted Easter Eggs by Kirsten Wind Hansen.  I used Artiste #10 thread and its called "spring".  The thread was a joy to work with and it may be one of my favorite colors as well. I made 17 of these to give to family and friends and I am going to call them #10 in the motif challenge.  These were actually pretty time consuming to make for as simple as they look. The little beaded chicks took quite a bit of time to make and I ended up having to starch the tatting so by the time I was done making 17 complete ornaments I never wanted to make another one but low and behold I remembered that I forgot to add someone to my list so I am going to have to buckle down and make one more which will bring the total up to 18 (Yes I did that math in my head)

Easter plastic canvas and doily

Happy Friday! Here we are at another weekend and another week in the memory bank. Ok, probably not so much in the memory, more like gone to the annals of the lost and gone. The week has gone by in somewhat of a blur but from what I remember I didn't get a much tatting done.  I did however finish an Easter project in plastic canvas.  The pattern was on sale so I splurged and bought it. You can find it here.

Thinking back I guess I did finish another row on my doily. I did employ the same method of adding a tiny picot between a couple of rings in this row that looking back on the last doily has a tendency to flip and be a bit wobbly.  The little picots seems to have helped with this problem.  As you can see my kitty was lots of help while taking pictures.

 I don't expect I will get too much tatting done this weekend as I am working a show at a casino and I will be holding odd hours but hopefully it will be a good weekend none the less.

Happy belated Easter

Is anyone else seeing a pattern here?  Here lately I have been having trouble getting things completely finished on time. I seem to be one step behind the calendar. For some reason Easter just crept up and now its already gone. It was so close to St pats that I didn't even put the Easter decoration up.  I did get my motifs done in time I just didn't get them in the mail in time and I didn't get them posted on here on time but here they are...

This is #10 in the 25 Motif Challenge. I ended up making 7 of these. The pattern can be found(  here  ) I wish I could tell you whos pattern it is but I never could find a name on the site. The thread is vintage J&P Coats in pastel and I did these with a needle. I am so much quicker with a needle but I am still working with my shuttles to try to get faster with them.

First ever shuttle motif

I do believe I am going to count this one as #11 in the motif challenge!

Since I was very familiar with the egg pattern I decided to try one with the shuttle. Wow was it ever full of firsts. I used 2 shuttles so I could see if I could change colors where I wanted to and I do believe I did that. Right out of the gate I had to do a split ring and that wasn't too terrible. Then I had to do a folded join, now that ended up being much more difficult! I had to pick it out twice which is no easy task and it made the thread in that spot pretty wonky but I did it! Then I got to do a split chain, that went ok but I had to pick it out once so it made the thread in that spot funky as well. When I started on the outside I only hid one end of the thread. When  I got toward the end I had a bad feeling I was going to run out of thread and sure enough I did on the very last chain so I ended up finger tatting to get me to the end.  When I came to the end I used a loop of thread to try to hide the ends (including the one I didn't hide at the beginning of this row) but I wasn't able to pull through so much thread at once so I wasn't able to hide the other end and to top that off it was so short that I cant use a needle to hide that in so that one is just not going to get done. All in all I believe this went ok for my very first shuttle motif! I am a perfectionist so of course when I look at it all I see are the mistakes so I will probably just hide it away and bring it out after I do a bunch more so I can compare how far I have come!