I’m

excited to have finished this version of the first section of the tea cloth.  It’s just the tiny center part of the complete piece, but for this version I’m stopping here as a sample of that center.  I’m really happy with the way it came out and how the colors all worked together.  I did it in these rainbow colors because I wanted to show how the individual rounds were done.  I pulled out the bottom half of all the small circular motifs of the second round and did them as single piece.  Then combine the top half of those motifs with the circular motifs of the third round and traveled around the piece using split rings to get from one circular motif to the next.  It was so nice to only have 4 ends to hide at the end of that rather than the 32 that would have resulted from doing them all separately.

I’ve also finished writing up the pattern for this.  Actually, I finished it while doing the yellow and green one months and months ago and doing this version was my way of checking the pattern.

Next up to format the pattern and add the pictures.  It will be exciting to have this small version of the piece written up.  Still lots to do for the whole tea cloth, but this feels like a nice milestone.

Here is the other piece I’ve been working on using the tea cloth pattern.  The green part in the center of this one is as far along as I’m going to go with the rainbow version I shared earlier.  This one still has some more to go to fill the spaces between what I’m calling the yellow “petals.”  I’m going to do them in the same green as the center.

In hindsight, I wish I had done the green in brown.  Then the parts between the petals in the green.  I think it would look like a sunflower that way.

I’m doing this one in Manuala, one of my favorite threads to work with.  I’m so sad that they’ve been discontinued.  I’ve been reserving what I have left for especially exciting projects.  The 8 petals too up the WHOLE ball.  I had only about a single shuttle full of thread leftover at the end of it.  I think I probably did have to cut out some chunks after finding mistakes which would have wasted some as well.

When I’m finished with this section I’ll be only about half way through the full tea cloth.  I might do the third (out of four) sections after this, or I may just stop here and start a whole new one after this.  Eventually, I’d like to have a nice finished version of the tea cloth for each of the 4 stopping points.  Here’s the full piece again from the original Priscilla book.  Still need to zoom in to see where I am.

Here is the ongoing center of the tea cloth, now with the blue “half circles” done.  Actually, in the original book they’re called “Half Circle Joining Motif of Fourth Circle” which is a bit cumbersome.  I call them the “Jellyfish motifs” which seems more accurate to their shape.  I’m excited to have gotten this far along.  All that’s left are the 8 “Oblong Motifs Outside of the Fourth Circle” and then I can call this one done.  In this particular project all I wanted to get done and photographed was this first section.  I’ve split the whole tea cloth into four sections and am trying to rewrite the pattern so that you could easily stop at the end of any of the sections and still have a really cool piece.  The whole thing is pretty intimidating by shear volume of tatting, but this first section is pretty straight forward and not actually very large compared to a lot of the other doilies out there.

Here’s a close up of the jellyfish.

I have been working hard on the tea cloth from Priscilla Book #2 lately.  I’ve gotten much further along on another version of it, but today I wanted to share this new one that I started.  I’ve used split rings and chains to combine a lot of the little motifs that made up rounds two and three of the original and I realized that when done all in one color (as the other one I’m working on is) you can’t actually tell.  So for writing out the pattern, I’ve started this new version in which each round is done in a different color. I think it helps make it much more clear.  At least I sure hope so!

I’ve actually almost finished with the round after this one, (which is done in blue) and I’ll post a picture of that soon.  Then one more round (in green for the complete rainbow) and some work on finalizing the pattern.  I’m pretty excited to have gotten this far, but of course, this is only the very, very center of what will be a much larger piece.  For reference, here’s a picture of that.  You’ll have to zoom into the center a lot to see where my little piece fits in.  🙂