Designing a necklace

Designing a necklace may not seem all that hard but it can be when your mind has too many thoughts to settle on just one! Last night things started to gel just in time for bed. I hate it when the good ideas flow right before I really need to settle down for the night. I lay in bed trying to turn my designs off and let them travel into my dreams. The mind tends to race where it will and after much difficulty I finally managed to convince myself that sleep would help make the design better in the long run. It also helps to have some practice with meditation so I could clear my mind enough to sleep.

Above is the final result of the all day process of designing the necklace. The thread is size 80 Lizbeth thread. The color way is Autumn Leaves. It is more the orange, yellow and read that is not really represented well in the picture above. I began with a "rose" design center similar to the one found in the book "24 Julestjerner i Orkis" by Lene Bjorn. The center is based on the 3 December snowflake. I added the last round of my own design to fill out the rest of the medallion. 

This is the last piece that I needed to design for tomorrows gathering at the church. I had hoped to make one other item but I just ran out of time. So now my piece is drying and should be ready by the time I leave for tomorrow's activity. 

This post actually took two days to complete. I began the first part just before bed last night but from the picture down was written on the second day. The one thing I love about my tablet is that I can begin my blog post without having my computer up. Blogger will allow me to save the first part as a draft so that I can come back to it and complete it for publication later. 

With that I will bid you all "good night" and go to my nightly rest because tomorrow will be a very busy day (at least in the morning hours). Then it will be back to designing and working up new patterns for myself. I also hope to get back to dyeing threads and more posts than have been happening recently. Thank you for sticking with me while I was other wise occupied with this last big project.

Happy Tatting
Arial - Tatting Faerie

Finally finished!

I am finally finished with my major project for next weekend. I have finished a total of 112 tea roses using Ruth's pattern found Here. I ended up modifying the leaf portion of the pattern to just simple rings using one shuttle verses using the shuttle and ball with rings and chains. With that one change, the leaves worked up much quicker so that I could get the work done and ready for someone else to work with before Saturday.

The picture above is when I managed to get all of the roses strung on the pin stems that I made.

The above picture here is when I got all of the roses wrapped up and the thread left to bind it. 

This last picture is all of the roses with the green leaves attached and the florist tape wrapped around the stems. No matter how much I do this part, it is the worst part for me as my fingers end up very, very sticky from having to stretch the tape to activate the adhesive. 

I realized that after doing this I should have made my first picture of all of the rose bases without the stem pins. Would have made a better progression. It took several weeks for me to do the individual roses but it was less than 5 days for me to get everything together and assembled. 

My next project will be to design a necklace using fall colors including (gasp) beads. The gasp is because I have done very little work up until now using beads. For as long as I have been tatting, I have admired those who are able to tat with beads without thinking about it. I have done beads using the "over the picot join" to attach them. I may do so with this one again. However, I am also going to use some jump rings to attach both the dangle beads and chains. Will post more on this later when I get it done.

BTW; The pictures above were taken with my Samsung Galaxy tablet. I really love this thing.

Until next time.

Happy tatting!

Arial - Tatting Faerie

Little to post right now....

I am sorry that I have not had stuff for you to read lately. Since getting my Galaxy Tablet, I had hoped that I would be able to post a little more often but alas it is not to be right now. I am really busy with tatting nearly 200 tea roses for an upcoming event in late September. 

I am still getting used to the attached keyboard which lets me type faster than if I were hunting and pecking on the screen.

I am managing on getting about 8 to 10 base patterns tatted a day. I hope to have them done as soon as possible so that I can get back to creating the tatting pockets that I talked about in an earlier post. I have also come up with some ideas for pendants that I can list in a shop I want to create on Etsy. It really is too bad that I have so many ideas and not enough time to do everything that I really want to do.

On the bright side, I am now a grand mother for the 6th time.


This lovely little lady is Miss Rebecca Erin. It was really funny to announce her birth as my son and his wife are stationed in Okinawa Japan. She was technically born on Friday, August 31, but I got to announce her birth about 2 in the afternoon on Thursday to some friends. Had to explain how that was possible since they are on the other side of the date line from us.

Well I guess that I will post this and get back to my roses.

Happy tatting


Arial - Tatting Faerie.