Moving on to bigger things - bookmarks

My mother requested a bookmark for a book she was reading this summer, and I made her this simple bookmark from the Learn to Tat book:

It's a very easy pattern, but naturally I ran out of pink thread and I had to improvise the end... Despite the easy pattern it took me several days to complete, even though I made it a lot shorter than it's supposed to be. My mother was halfway through the book by the time I was done :p The thread is two different brands of size 20.

One of the first pattern books I bought was Dianna Stevens's Animal Bookmarks - A Tatted Zoo. It has lots of wonderful animal patterns, ranging from (fairly) easy to complicated. I decided I'd start with one of the easier patterns - the Alligator bookmark :) I filled two Sew Mates with green and yellow thread and started the alligator on the long bus ride back from my summer holiday, and a few days later I had made this:

I am still very proud of this one :) The hardest part was the head, and knowing which way to turn the work when doing the eye. I made an extra join underneath the gator's chin to make him less chubby, but apart from that I managed follow the pattern to the dot. Well, except that I made the body behind the back legs about two rings shorter, and I shrunk the second ring from the back of his head in an attempt to give him a neck. I ran out of green thread when I had six or seven rings left, and of course all I had had been on the shuttle...  Luckily I had a practice piece lying around that I was about to throw away, and I managed to unpick most of it and use the thread to finish the alligator. Yay! Can you see that two of the yellow chains on his back are a little fatter than the rest? I almost can't :) 

All in all I am pretty pleased, though I call it a crocodile rather than an alligator - I think crocodiles are way cooler :) The thread is Gjestal Maxi, a cheap crochet cotton about size 10. It's a little soft and lumpy, but it's alright for bookmarks and test projects.

After the alligator I wanted to make another (simple) bookmark, and I came across the Thistle Bookmark pattern online. The pattern doesn't specify what colors to use, so I made it in green and pink to look like a real thistle flower. Pretty, right?

The pattern itself was very easy to follow and gave me no problems at all. The trouble started when I decided that to save myself a little work, I would do a split chain to continue onto the stem without cutting the thread. Yeah, that sure worked... I'd only tried a split chain once before, and that ended in a twisted mess of lumpy half stitches:

This time I actually did the stitches right, but it ended up being to loose, and it didn't look good... I finished the stem, then I attached the thread to the ouside of  the split chain to stabilize it a little, and I continued to add another chain down the other side of the stem. Finally I made another small chain on the other side of the last "lump" of the green circle for symmetry. So I ended up having two ends to sew in anyway, and a very floppy join between the flower and the stem. Meh...

The pink thread is Mölnlycke Virkgarn and the green is Coats Opera, both size 20.