Wednesday, March 20, 2019

Coming Along With the Crown

    My crown is coming along. After restarting a few times and especially restarting this round 4 times, I am finally getting it. I kept doing stupid stuff like leaving out stitches in the chain that have to be there or it looks lopsided and cannot join. Instead of untatting it, it was simpler to start over. This is the furthest I have gotten and now I am in the swing of it, getting it right.
     The hardest part lately is getting time to work on it. I try to do it in the mornings, before work, but often I have other things that need doing. Life definitely happens!
    Thanks to Jane Eborall for teaching the vsp in her TIASes (Is that correct?). My vsp's are just barely big enough to get my #12 crochet hook through. It looks better though.



    I have three repeats done. There are 11 total. then there will be the nightmare of blocking it and stiffening it to stand upright. I think I will put this one on display at Tat Days this September. Other than that, I have no plans for it. I just always wanted to make it.

Saturday, March 2, 2019

Starting the Crown Again

    It has been a really lousy six weeks. I got some kind of crud that settled in my chest and would not let go. I was wheezing and what I would call chain coughing, where it just goes on for 15 minutes. The really bad part was it was not productive at all, so the gunk just stayed there. Now I am finally getting over it, after the third round of antibiotics. That is why I have not been tatting a lot, especially on the Faith Crown project.
    I kept looking at that crown. The rings are not even, there is a place where I joined and got in a hurry that looks terrible. I was just not happy with it, even though I wanted to use it to find errors and difficulties. Ok. I think I did that. I now have restarted it. I used bigger shuttles to do the first round so there would be no joins needed that would look unsightly. I think this is much better.

    For some reason, the white thread looks pink in this light. I did not bother to correct the image. Please bear with me.
    The second round has something that I find interesting. It is not in the pattern. I have been playing with a technique, but I am not sure what it is. In the closeup photo, you see I am putting a chain across the rings. 
    When I join, I make the standard down join to make a lock stitch. I then put the shuttle hook up through the picot and pull the shuttle thread back down through and pass the shuttle through the loop like an up join. This effectively makes a larks head knot. The reason I wanted to do this was to make the join balanced and even.What I see is a bar going across the join, the ball thread still on the left and the shuttle thread exiting a larks head knot. Now I need a picot here so that makes it all the easier to do. The question I have is, is this a standard stitch, like maybe a Catherine Wheel? Or something like that? I just don't really know. It does balance out my joins, though.