An angry wolf and a swine was having fun...

No, it's not  from a fable. It's just my lupus acting up and me, being so stupid as to get the swine flu vaccination on top of it. Too late I found out, that the doctor only had the vaccination with the immune system booster, which is kinda bad when you actually try to supress the immune system all that you can. :P It will probably take a while before I'm back on track again.

Did my muse go on vacation?

She (or shouldn't I, as a woman, have a male muse? I mean we do live in an age with gender equality, don't we?) wasn't helpful at all when I tried to find inspiration to the stitch count for my design project. As I wrote earlier, I'm not that happy with the way the 1. and the 2. round looks when put together. It seems like the piece needs a round 3. or a change in either the 1. or the 2.

However, until I test tatted I did honestly think it would make a nice, flat something, but alas, that was not to be. It has a remarkable cup-shape now, and even if I were to beat it down with a sledge hammer, I'm quite sure it would pop back in that shape again. There is no way that is ever going to be flat (I think I might have done permanent damage to the scanner in the attempt to get a decent picture :o). So...back to the drawing board. Now, please ascend, you muse of fire tatting and give me the right stitch count so I don't have to do it all over again next time. QQ

Next projects

I've got 2 projects I'm working on atm (not counting the UFO-baby cap I ought to have finished ages ago). My first project is inspired from some fabric I saw in a hobby shop. Creamy white linnen with *yuck* spiders on it. I immediately thought of a gothic / Halloween'ish sort of pouch, with a thicker black edging than I usually do. It will also get some kind of a handle, I've decided. I'm almost done with the edging itself. I used Cebelia 30, which is some what thicker than my usual DMC 80. I will have to see how it works out on the final bag, but atm I'm thinking it could have been fun with an even thicker yarn.


My other project is for the design class. I made a pattern, inspired by a snowflake and the upcoming Christmas. Sort of a wheel-shape surrounded by hearts. It looks very good on paper, if you ask me :P, but now that I'm tatting it, I'm not sure if it works as well as I hoped. The center is very dense while the ring of hearts is the opposite. I think it might need a 3. round to sort of balance the first and the second? Pictures coming up when I'm done, which should hopefully be in a day or two.

Big promises!

Some time ago I found a marvelous little book from 1915 hidden away in our Royal Library, in the Medicin / Science department. How on earth a tatting book ended there would probably make a great story. I imagine a tatting secretary in the late 1920'ies secretly giving it the wrong label so she could keep it for herself for the next decades. :D

But the weird, handwritten label isn't what make this book so fun. It's the titel itself:  "BOGEN OM ORKIS - Regler for at komponere et uendeligt antal mønstre på den hurtigste måde". My best translation (bear with me): "The book about tatting - rules for composing an unlimited amount of patterns in the quickest possible way". I must say the dear Esther didn't lack self confidence. :D

I must confess I eagerly grabbed the book when it came to my hands. Imagine: Here I had the book that would reveal to me how I could design an unlimited amount of patterns and then be quick about it too! It was almost like when Indy could hold the Holy Grail in his hands for the first time!!


Sadly, I think the book had more to reveal in the 1920'ies than today. Her best advise is to change the numbers of picots and size of rings and chains, and take one motif and entangle another / tat another one around it 'for endless possibilities'. I guess it wasn't this book that was supposed to start my design career. :P Apart from that bitter disappointment :D I really like the book. There is just something about old / older books. The looks, the texture, the smell, the way they used the words...I wish I could keep it, but sadly I have to hand it back in today. Bye bye Esther, it was fun.

A leap into the seventy thousand fathoms of water :-o

When I started this blog I knew that I someday wanted to make it a public blog. How ever I am so very much a chicken so until now only a few select people have had access. Now I finally managed to get the courage to publish it, thus taking my own grand leap of uncertainty (yes, I always favored drama \o/) and make it yet another tiny drop in the big ocean of blogs. :P With a bit of luck I might even get someone to browse past it at some point. :D

Yet another star and some design sighs

Lots of things has happened lately, so I haven't found the time to scan this star I made a while ago, when I was staying a couple of days at my parents place.
I still haven't found out whether I dare iron this metallic yarn or not, so if it looks sloppy I hope that's the reason. :P
I need to make many more, if I want to keep the promise I made to myself.
How ever it's a lot more fun to work on a new pattern for the design class. I'm very proud of the looks of it *beaming with pride*, there is just one "slight" detail that is troubling me at the moment. How on earth am I supposed to find the right number of stitches for the design? It looks so nice on paper, but I'm quite sure it won't look anything like it at all, if I try tatting it with the numbers I've tried so far. Making your own patterns is indeed a lot harder than one should think, and I didn't expect it to be easy.

Bits of this and that

It turns out the bag was very well received, which makes me so happy. I've never made a bag like this before, and I had no pattern for it (couldn't find one I liked), so I build it in normal paper first and then made my own. The thing she liked best was apparently the pentagram, so good thing I ended up putting it where I did. :D

And I have to post how a good girl I've been! I stuck to my promise and made a Christmas Star / Snowflake yesterday, before I started anything new. I'll see if I can post a picture of it soon.