5th Motif - Green Butterfly

This butterfly will be taking flight soon to the Palmetto Tatting Guild - it is my membership butterfly for 2010.

I made this butterfly once before when I first began tatting and it was quite a challenge then. This time I used a finer thread and took my time. The butterfly is actually five sections all joined together.

 
I used both shuttle and needle tatting techniques to make this butterfly. I could have done the entire butterfly using either technique, but I had already wound shuttles for both colors using the continuous thread method and I did not want to make the two- and three-ring centers using the thread on the shuttles. They are such small sections that I decided to needle tat them and leave the thread CTM on the shuttles for the larger outside sections of the wings.

Now fly away, fly away little butterfly...

4th Motif - Curds and Whey

Now that I  have Mary Konior's Tatting with Visual Patterns, I want to try every pattern in her book. One of the patterns I've been wanting to work on are edgings. The pattern I selected out of Mary's book was Curds and Whey.

 

It requires only one shuttle and I filled a plastic Clover shuttle and was able to complete this piece with 3-4 inches of thread left over. It measures about 7' (or 19cm) When I ordered the book from Handy Hands, they included a small spool of thread to try and I loved working with it. I could not find a number on it but is a size 40 thread and from the pictures on their website it could be the Grape Pizzaz color. It's absolutely gorgeous and a dream to work with.

I also worked on a small edging and added it to a burp cloth during the Superbowl Game which you can see on Tatteristic's main blog.