Ready to Start Experimenting

This weekend I tatted up the three base pieces of what I’ll use to figure out how to piece together the shawl.  At first I was finding this little piece of the project depressing because it meant about 6 hours of tatting before I would actually be able to play around with the edging ideas I’d come up with on the computer.  And then it will be hours of tatting trying out the edgings and connectors trying to find something that works before I can even START work on the actual shawl.

So I was a little disinclined to actually start tatting this.  I kept thinking “This is going to be hours and hours of tatting and in the end I’ll know how to do the edgings and the connectors on the shawl, but all I’ll actually have to show for it is a little mini-shawl.”

But I knew it was something that would have to be done to put together the big shawl so I forced myself to get the first little triangle panel tatted.  By the time I finished that I was totally over the whole pseudo-depression about having to do a whole bunch of tatting before actually being able to put together my shawl.  As soon as I had something physical in my hands I was thinking “Awesome!  When all this is done I’ll know how to do the big shawl AND I’m going to have a little mini-shawl that I can use to more easily show other tatters how great this little motif is and all the cool ways you can use different versions of it in the same piece!”

That’s always the case for me.  When designing it takes me a while to actually get started with the tatting because it’s depressing to know I’m going to end up doing a lot of tatting that doesn’t end up working, but once I actually get started and have a piece of lace I get all excited about the project again. 

So this weekend I finished off all three panels.  These are the smaller equivalents of the pieces of the big shawl.  Next step is to take my diagrammed out ideas and start tatting.  Hopefully they’ll all fit together nicely without out too much cutting and re-tatting.  🙂

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