Using the Scissors to Finish a Project

Before

Today I made the oh-so emotional decision to cut off a piece of perfectly good tatting.  Well, I made the decision a while back, but couldn’t bring myself to actually do the cutting.  Today I tackled it on my lunch break.

I’ve been working on this large doily from the Priscilla Tatting Book #3.  I want to make one in size 20, but wanted first to figure out a more effective way to make it since the original directions call for making all the motifs separately and putting it together at the end.  I wanted to figure out how to piece it together while tatting.  To help with that I started this one in size 3 so that I could easily look back later and see what I’d done.  This is such an elaborate doily that size 3 should work out to a small tablecloth.

After

I got as far as the first picture when I discovered that Michaels and Joanns have stopped carrying the Royle Brand thread that I’m using for this.  I think actually it’s been bought by Aunt Lydia because that’s what they both have instead and I’d never seen that before.  Unfortunately, they don’t seem to have the same colors.  The light blue matches to some extent, but there’s no dark blue at all.  I have enough to thread to make the rest of the dark blue motifs around this bit, but not beyond that.  I didn’t think I’d like the way it would work if I just stopped at that point.  I could make the rest of it in white and just have a blue center, but that didn’t really appeal to me either.  So I decided to just cut off the last motif that I made and call it done.

"Maybe it can be a barrette."

My co-worker thought it was sad to throw away the motif that I had to cut off.  Considering the number of knot-stitches in the motif I thought it was pretty sad too, but not worth the trouble to make something out of it.  So I trashed the little cut up motif and I’m moving on to the next project.  It’s nice to finish up a large project even if it didn’t end up as large as I originally planned and even if it required a pair of scissors to do it.  I’ll still eventually make the whole thing but for now I’m happy to have figured out how to make the leaves two at a time so that I have less ends to hid.