Motifs #4 (an oops!) and #5 (almost perfect, but not quite!) Bookmarks!

6/3/11
Kristen says...

Oh look, if you see the date the "U.S." way, it's our wedding anniversary!! (But it's not...my sisters both got married in March, Chris and I got married in June).

Anyway...I have been doing a bit more tatting this weekend. After creating the da-lily from a few weeks ago I realized that it had been a long time since I'd tatted anything with color in it. I found some REALLY nice off-white thread down here that is pretty cheap for a large roll, so I've been using it a lot lately. (I think all my previous motifs (except the hat band and I guess the cross bookmark, which I made back in October) used it, even the lily part of the da-lily.) I decided I needed a little more color in my tatting life...and was helped out in this endeavour by finding a little tatting gem in downtown Tegucigalpa...for a whopping $5.25 (105 Lempira) I got all this:

Yep. 21 rolls of thread, 5 lempira (25 cents) each!

I don't think it's terribly high quality, but at 25 cents a roll, you can't beat it!! The other store I usually shop at (and get those big off-white rolls) charge 12-16 Lempira, or less than 50 cents/roll...still not bad!

Also, I recently subscribed to and got a link to all the old patterns from Be-Stitched.com. I really like to read, and I really like to make bookmarks, and, after a long week of teaching and trying to stay one step ahead of the middle schoolers, I really really like the "mindless simplicity" of ring, chain, ring, chain...so I decided to tackle this Bookmark motif.

The first time I totally messed it up...apparently I got too caught up in the tatting and not caught up enough on the counting...so I decided to make lemons out of lemonaide and do something with it...the ribbon was 10 Lps for 3 yards...
And then I decided to do it over...almost right this time. Here's where I started making errors the first time: And here's the first and second attempts, close-up:

Notice I actually did it right the second time!!

Once the second part was done correctly (finally!) I added a second round in this lovely shade of gray I found downtown...(haha did I say I was going for color this time around? Because gray and dusty blue are colors...right?)
I say this second version is almost perfect because I didn't realize (or read) the directions that said to make the chains around the edge 5 - 5 instead of the 4 - 4 of the rest of the bookmark...so one of the ends is a little tight, but I've decided to use that as the top part, so it works...

I also made it a little longer than the directions say...I like long bookmarks (I found a piece of plastic that is, to me, the perfect length/thickness for a bookmark...here's motif #5 next to the bookmark length plastic...on top of the book ("At Home" by Bill Bryson) I finally finished today!

It's been a really productive weekend! (Well, except for school stuff...I didn't do much of that at all!)

I also dusted off the camera a bit...I received some lovely yellow roses at school this week, and brought them home for the weekend...I didn't really have a vase here, so I used Chris' stemless wine glass and a tea cup...these were two of my favorite shots:





















On the non-tatting front, Chris and I are headed out with the 6th graders to the Copán Ruins this Wednesday...so there will be no blog posts late in the week, but I hope a large amount of pictures early next week (once I have recovered!!) :)

KF