Still alive :)

Hi there! Got a question in a comment last night if I am alright, because I haven't posted anything for months. So I just wanted to tell you that I am :) I just haven't been very active online this year because I'm at school for several hours a day and don't feel like doing much when I get home. I'm taking math & physics, which is really really hard and takes a lot more effort than anything I've ever done, so naturally I don't have anything to post about... To be honest I haven't tatted anything since the beginning of January (I think), which is a bit sad. I tend to do everything in periods, and right now I'm knitting. Hadn't really knitted for a couple of years, so it's been fun rediscovering it :) Nothing is finished yet, so I have nothing to show you... I have also learned to use my sewing machine, which was a new year's resolution I made. I started a small quilt, but I only finished a handbag for my mother for her birthday:

She wanted a bag to put her choir notes in, and requested that there was musical notes on it. Couldn't find fabric with notes on, so I appliqued some on, cut from an old t-shirt. I'm pretty pleased with the result, for not having sewn anything useful before, and my mother loved it :) I had planned to put some tatted bling on the bag, but in the end I ran out of time :/ I only finished putting the handles on twenty minutes before my mother arrived! Perhaps I'll make her some bling for Christmas instead :)

Anyway, that's a few reasons why I've been so quiet lately. I did a count of how many items I'm up to in the 25 motif challenge, and I think I'm at 19. 18 if you don't count the cluny attempts. So I have a few more to go, and perhaps it will motivate me to pick up my tatting again :) Right now most of my supplies are buried underneath a pile of yarn so big I haven't dared to look through it... If I tip the pile over it will completely take over our livingroom! (Alright, so our livingroom is very small, but still...) 

Since I have nothing new to show, I'll post a picture of my almost finished snail from Inga Madsen's Tatted Animals:

I turned the shell around, because it spiraled the wrong way. Just need to make the antennae and the last few rings & chains on the shell! Don't remember what the yellow thread is called, but the shell color is Lizbeth (not sure, but I think it's Razzle Dazzle). 

Well, that will have to do for now. If I go all quiet again, at least you know why :)

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.