A Tale of Two Doilies

Doily No. 1

I have always wanted to tat the pattern Mat #34 from the DMC Book of Charted Tatting Designs ever since I saw Tattycat's version of it so many years ago.  You can see it here and here. I couldn't at that time because I don't have the book.

I finally got me the book last year but did not tat it right away because of other on-going projects.  Finally managed to start on it a few weeks ago. As it was, I picked a HDT and soon enough ran out of thread as I had blogged earlier.  I picked a yellow/lemon solid colour to continue and here it is at Round 6 of 7 rounds.

I think it is going along great with the yellow, even though not as colourful as Tattycat's.

Doily No. 2

I was attracted to Norma Benporath's(NB) pattern that were published in the Trove, firstly by the beautiful designs, and secondly for the challenge of deciphering patterns written in the old style.  I have attempted a few of the patterns, and came out tops here and not so here.  If you want to view all blog entries on my attempts of Norma Banporath's pattern, click on her name on the tags section on right side of the blog.

And here is the latest attempt.  As you can see, I have chosen to use the gold coloured thread for this round, and after reading all your comments, I plan to use the pink as well later. However, I may have to cut this latest round off and start again.  And, the yellow lines?  I will explain.

A characteristic of NB's designs, as observed from the patterns on the Trove, is the use of stand-alone 3-rings or 4-rings clusters as used here.  Each set of 4-rings is tatted individually, so imagine the number of ends to hide just for this round, 12 pairs to exact.  I chose to utilise the splits rings again for this round which I think will work nicely.

Now, these rings are really big, from 33ds in the smallest ring to 54ds in the biggest, with picots every 3ds.  That is too much to handle, so I decided to tat without picots except for the joining picots.  It is hard enough to close large rings, let alone trying to keep all the picots in shape.

The reasons for cutting them off ..

• When I counted the ds to determine the position of the joining picots, I miscounted the number in one of the rings (marked A).  Notice the odd shape compared to B?
• Continuing with the same ds count, I have the feeling that this row will ruffle and not stay flat.  You can see  from the yellow lines that the outermost rings (on left and right) have exceeded the span of what it should be.  I will be reducing the ds count in this row, hoping that it will not affect the next row. Will see about that when I get there.

... to be continued