Blue this time

When my sister and brother in law were visiting on the weekend they thought I ought to make lots of bracelets like the one shown in the previous post. Sounds like a good idea in theory. Then I pointed out that it takes a lot of time to make and it wouldn't fetch the necessary price. When pressed to say how long it took I figured 4 or 5 hours. That particular bracelet had been done with beads from a tube of mixed beads that I had separated out to get the shades I wanted.

Just out of curiosity to see how long it would take, I thought I'd do another one although I wasn't about to spend another evening separating beads. So I went through my meager stash of beads and matched up 2 colours of beads with a solid and variegated thread, and set out to remake the bracelet.  Right after I tatted the first ring I twisted my hand in an awkward position that made the muscles in my thumb and wrist cramp up.  I thought about tatting left handed, but even holding the thread caused my thumb to hurt.

Between the pain in my hand and the excitement of the hockey game, I only got about half of one side done before I put it aside and went to bed. I picked it up the next evening and finished it. So I guess the real answer to how long it took is probably a leisurely 8 hours.

Of course there were some little interruptions along the way like having to ice my hand, pulling the hook out of my shuttle while doing a bead join and nearly shredding the thread a couple of times doing a really tight join. When there aren't a lot of bead joins to do, I position the bead and hold it in place with a safety pin until I need to make the join. When there are a lot of bead joins like in this pattern I just guess at the needed picot size and sometimes it's really tight. Then, when I use a very fine hook, it's easy to split the thread and only grab half of it. At that point it's as likely as not that the hook will tear the thread. I didn't want to deal with broken thread, so I just worked very carefully when that happened. Then there was the search for the second half of the barrel clasp that somehow became detached and got lodged down the side of the couch.

Now that it's done, I don't think I like this one as well as the purple bracelet, although it's the same pattern and I'm not sure why.