Close, but no cigar

The phrase, and its variant 'nice try, but no cigar', are of US origin and date from the mid-20th century. Fairground stalls gave out cigars as prizes, and this is the most likely source, although there's no definitive evidence to prove that. -and why should you care?

I started with the failed design from November 12th because I really liked the reinforced daisy shape, but I could tell the the arms had too many stitches to fit in the available space and rather than waste any more tatting time I cut off the arm and started back at the second row. (I'm not counting the starting ring as a separate row.) After the central ring that daisy shape is made by chains joined to each other and the last petal of the daisy is a split chain allowing the second row to wrap around the top of the petals. Muskaan should love this design since she loves to pick out the flower shapes in her tatting.

Row 3 has short side chains that join side to side and 3 little rings joined into the space above the lock join. I showed that little spot which isn't a picot as a tiny circle where the 3 rings join. Row 3 also ends with a short split chain. Row 4 is ring and chain with a ring thrown off the top of the chain at the tip of the point. I realized as I was writing this out that I had forgotten to shade the ring at the tip to show that it's done with the second shuttle. Of course that meant that I needed to show a second shuttle in my "legend" which I had also forgotten.

In addition to the central daisy, I also like the filigree effect of this design although the rings at the tips seem too small, but I like them anyway. Only, it's not very snowflake-y AGAIN. A perfectly lovely design, just not what I was looking for. I've been on a roll designing and drawing 6 designs in 20 days, but none of them were what I was hoping for. Close, but not quite. So I have the next rendition already on the shuttles.

I'm not sure it's going to work either, but I think I'll give it a break and go back to the November 8 Snowflake as I want to see what it looks like with 8 arms instead of 6. If it sits right and looks good I'm thinking of doing a multi motif design in different colours, but that will depend on how it looks, what colours I have available in the necessary quantities.

And why should you care that it was close, but no cigar? I titled this post, which I had written previously in Notepad but not saved because it was just a short post. Then it occurred to me that such idiomatic expressions don't make sense to international readers so I Googled it to find the source, for your edification. As I was holding down the CTRL key after copying the meaning of the idiom I switched screens back to the unsaved Notepad file which I had previously highlighted to copy it. At that point I accidentally hit the letter T and deleted the whole post!!!

And the whole point of this saga was to provide you with the pattern for the above snowflake, which is posted here: