This weekend I only made a little bit of progress on the tea cloth as I spent most of my time working on an UFO from a while back. Finished it too, which is always nice.   I’ll probably write about that tomorrow.  I did try these circles of the 4th round with chains of 4ds instead of the 5 on the pattern and I think they worked much better.  The difference in the chains is probably due to the different way I did the center circles.  Hopefully that changes doesn’t propagate TOO far throughout the rest of the piece, but I imagine I’ll have to make changes throughout the whole thing anyway so maybe it doesn’t actually matter much.  It’s fun to watch this piece take shape.  I think that now it sort of looks like an alien creature, but that might have been because I was listening to “A Princess of Mars” by Edgar Rice Burroughs as an audio book while making it.

You can’t tell in this picture, but when I made the third circle I actually forgot to join it to the piece so I tied it on afterwards.  As the piece takes shape I’d sort of been questioning my decision to make a “throw away” version first out of old crappy thread with unhidden ends and leaving in the pieces where there’s a mistake, but I’m still glad I’m doing it.  I’ve started my first “real” version in nice thread, but haven’t gotten very far yet, partly because I keep changing my mind about the colors.  If my “test” version and my “real” version were the same I’d never make any progress.

So my question now is what to do with this “throw away” version when I’ve finished my first “real” one.  I’ll probably continue on with this test one throughout the entire piece so when I’m done I’m going to have a HUGE piece of “throw away” tatting.  So do I actually throw it away?

Got started on the 4th round of the tea cloth, but wanted to see what the motif that it is made up of would look like on its own.  I like it by itself.  This is about three inches across so seems a bit large in size 10 to use as earrings or a pendant, but maybe in a smaller thread.

I climbed out of the first round on this one to get to the second, but I forgot to start off with a chain so there’s a missing chain on the inner round.  I thought about doing a split chain to put it in, but decided that it wasn’t worth the time.  In the future I’ll just have to remember to either start with the chain or (more likely) make the two rounds seperately.  Actually, I don’t think I have enough of this yellow left to make all eight of them like this so I’ll probably do yellow in the middle and orange on the outside.

I picked out my colors for the next one.  I’m going to try it again in size 20 greens.  Figured I’d might as well start with a new size so that I can get an idea of how it will turn out as far as sizing so I can pick out a size to make the finished tea cloth in.  They actually have a version of this tea cloth at the Lace Museum in Sunnyvale and I can’t remember what size thread it’s made with, but I remember it was a lot bigger than I would have expected and it didn’t even include the outer part.  I plan on making these inner four rounds (maybe the 5th too) out of a couple different size threads just so I can get an idea of the sizing.  Should be interesting to see what they all look like together.