What happened to my Tatting?

I think there must be a time warp in the house, or maybe it's a black hole or something.
I've just finished uploading all of the information for the latest newsletter and while none of the projects were especially difficult, putting out this edition has been a real challenge! We had to go out of town for a while and I knew I wasn't going to be able to do much tatting while I was away so I left my shuttles home, confident of the fact that I had 3 projects and an edging nearly completed and ready to be drawn out...or so I thought.

I was experimenting with taking a six sided snowflake shape and modifying it into a butterfly. Upon my return I discovered that the lovely blue and purple butterfly I was working on, looks great on one side but on the other side there are all these extra rings I don't remember putting there... The circular motif at the centre of the snowflake has these floating rings coming off the chains that make the base for the head and tail but I didn't need those rings on the wings so I just ignored them and tatted the butterfly as if they weren't there.

Imagine my surprise when I pulled this misshapen mess out of my sewing basket to create the drawing and realized that this completed project either had to be patched in no less than 4 places with teeny tiny little thread ends, or I had to re-tat the whole thing. I re-tatted it as being a faster way of getting the job done.
The other butterfly that had been done in a pristine white fell into my teacup. I wasn't about to re-tat yet another project so I just made sure it was dyed uniformly tea colour. I didn't really need more work that had to be re-done!

Which brings me to my 3rd so called, finished project. Now I ask you, when was that last time you saw a pansy with 4 petals?. The rows that I thought were lying all neat and pretty are a mess, twisting every which way but right. The colours are ugly together, the design is pathetic and even if I wanted to just add in another petal to fix it, why bother? What it really needs is a quick burial.

So as I re-tatted yet another design I wondered how quickly I could design and tat a nice representation of a 3D columbine to round out the newsletter. Well, at least there were some partial designs already sitting in my drawing program, I would just have to finish things off and make them look pretty. Wrong again. Since the initial sketches I had used didn't work out in thread the way I thought they would, I'd had to alter the design from the ground up, or in drawing terms, from the centre out. So all of my partial diagrams had to be erased.