25 Motif Challenge

We've been talking about starting a tatting challenge and the more we discuss it the more possibilities there are. So that people can follow the progression of thought I thought I'd post about it on my blog so that people can offer their suggestions and input.
Here's the ideas we have been kicking around so far. We started out talking about a 100 motives. That's a lot, especially for people with busy lives. So we trimmed it back to 25 motives. We have discussed a time limit on this challenge and we considered anything from one month to the end of the year. I'm leaning more toward the end of the year personally just because of all the other things I have going.

Since the purpose of this challenge is to get as many people involved as possible we first of all need a really, really big turn out. One of the things that’s really helpful is to be able to show off what you have done and to receive encouragement from other people to keep going. For this purpose it has been suggested that each participant have their own blog where they can show what they are doing. That way everyone involved can check on each other's progress, comment on their work, offer suggestions and applaud their attempts.

Newbie tatters may want to participate but they are intimidated by the idea of creating even one new design so we have kicked around the ideas some more and here are some of the possible ways we could go.

We could break the challenge down into levels.
Beginner 5
Intermediate 15
Advanced 25
We could further add to the challenge so that for example advanced tatters need to do 5 motives one shuttle only, 5 ring and chain, 5 with 2 shuttle patterns, 5 with split rings, 5 with clunies or something similar. Intermediate could do a smaller number of the required designs.
For very new tatters, they could participate as well, not designing something new but just adding something to an existing design, such as adding beads or doing the pattern in 2 colours or other simple changes.

We haven't been talking about patterns just pictures of finished work so there's no copyright infringement to worry about. However, if we do end up with a tremendous response we could do a publication and include the designs much as was done years ago when a lot of the on-line tatters all contributed to a group publication. We haven't got that far in the discussion yet.
Where new tatters want to try modifying an existing pattern they can begin with any of the public domain designs without any concerns about copyright infringement.

What is a motif? We have kicked it around and considered that anything that is one round is a motif. So it could be a round, square, heart, cross, or butterfly shape or anything else your little heart desires. We could do 5 of each or whatever you want.

One of the other things we have discussed is that if the blogs all linked back to one another we could more easily see how each person has progressed. Blogs will let you add links down the side so each time somebody signs up, everybody else adds them to their blog links and they add everybody's links to their blog.

Anyway these are some of the things we have been discussing and I thought before a lot of mis-information started flowing through the tatting lists that it might be helpful to see what's been discussed so far.