Pet Peeve number 1

I was rummaging through a bunch of old tatted bits looking for something I know is probably in there. I didn't find it, so I'll have to keep looking. What I did find is the Inverted Heart Snowflake from my Tatted Flurries book that I tatted in Lizbeth Summer Fun. I like the colours, but the short colour changes make the design look like a dog's breakfast.

The dimpled rings are almost invisible in this thread, but here's what it looks like in a solid colour.

The design pops out.

Here's Summer Fun matched up with one of the colours in the mix, a plain pink. This is the anklet design, Hearts and Bows from my Summer Tatting book.

Here's the scan to give you a clearer picture.

Of course in this design the variegated thread is just used for the chains and it's a subdued background accent.

But here is the same colour paired with a solid turquoise and a solid pink for more than just chains.

I like variegated threads. In tatting it usually take a long time to transition from one colour to the next, but in the new threads like Lizbeth, the colour changes are faster and the results like in the first snowflake, just becomes a jumble of colours so that there isn't any gradual change, but rather an abrupt switch. This, to me, makes the finished piece look chopped up. Your eye jumps from spot to spot in one huge chaotic jumble of colour. Pairing the variegate with a matching solid colour, gives the design some continuity and the eye a chance to rest. I didn't care where the colours landed on the butterflies, because of their final purpose, but I have to say that in my opinion tatters need to take a step back from the variegated threads, so that they can be enjoyed more. That's just my opinion, feel free to disagree.

Blueberry? How about Cranberry Tea?

Having experimented with some left over cranberry sauce, I thought I'd try out some blueberry jam and see how blue it left the lace. The thread ends are more blue than the lace is. The lace is almost the same colour as the cranberry sample. How weird is that? Of course all of the additives made to the jam might be responsible for the reddish purple colour. Or maybe blueberry really is red!!!???

Notice the rings attached to the central ring? See that one of them is larger than the others? When I'm designing something new I start with a stitch count I think will work. If it doesn't I have the choice of starting again, or correcting the stitch count and continuing. If it's a scrap bit like this, I just keep going because I know it's going to have to be done over again anyway. Sometimes, you just need to do a test piece.

I made a double batch of cranberry sauce this year. Half of it was meant to go with the turkey and the other half formed the base for orange cranberry raisin filling for some Christmas cookies. I made the sauce with orange juice instead of water and that may have affected both the overall colour and the staying power of the cranberry colour. I had a lot of cranberry sauce and filling left over so I did some more experimenting.

I have done some butterflies that will be added to a plain T-shirt and one of them got dropped into a cup of tea. Brown isn't really a pretty butterfly colour so I dunked it into some cranberry sauce and mashed the berries into it. Here's Cranberry Tea:

I like it better than tea colour, but I mashed it hard enough to cut the thread. Either I sew it down fixing the break by tacking it in place or I cut out the break and re-do the chain after first matching the cranberry tea colour. Who am I kidding? I'm totally going to sew this mistake down.

Cranberry!

I like to wear plain cotton shirts. They feel good and they're more comfortable when I have "power surges". What I don't like is that:

A. Ladies cotton T's cost more than twice the price of men's.
B. I in variably splash tomato sauce on them.
C. The parrot's claws go right through the fabric poking lots of little holes through the shoulders.

That being the case I either walk around in tattered and stained clothes or I replace my shirts more often than the average woman. Which brings me back to A. So I have been buying a lot of men's T's and adding tatting to them. Since I splash a lot of whatever I'm cooking onto my shirts anyway, I was wondering what it would look like if I used natural dyes on fabric and or tatting.



Want to see Cranberry?





For how very red the fruit is, the lace looks kind of purple. I mashed a couple of berries into this little bit of white tatting then rinsed the residue off and washed the lace in a bit of dish soap. The colour isn't even and while I like how it looks on lace, I'm not sure what it would look like on a shirt. Of course if I ran the cranberry sauce, minus the sugar, through a blender, strained it and then left the shirt soaking in it for a good while I might get a darker and more even colour. Judging by the way the cranberry stains aren't coming out of my clothes even with repeated washings, I can be reasonable sure that this colour won't ever run.

The lace is just a little doodle of something or other I was designing so it was a scrap bit. Now that it's such a pretty colour I'll have to do something with it.