Another teaser

Just finished ebaying some more shuttles and bits and pieces of tatting so I decided to MAKE myself get back to the mystery animal.

This one has been a real pain! I've almost thrown it out of the window on numerous occasions. I've spent most evenings this week 'fiddling' with it!! The main problem now is just the length of the legs - the ones at the bottom of this scan. There is only one showing here and that's too long!!! I've re-written the text to shorten it and have changed the method of working it quite a bit too. The second leg which you can just see started behind it is coming out at the wrong angle so again this needs to be rectified. I've tried the head once and that wasn't too bad but have since re-drawn it. There's no way this creature can be worked, I feel, without cutting and tying after the second lower leg.

I think I've nearly got the back legs right at last!!! I'll 'tweak' them on the next one to make them a little better. This animal has claws which is what the cut picots at the end of the feet represent. Hey, ho, off to attack the face now!! Hopefully when this is done the guesswork and teasing will be over. Just below is the latest attempt done this afternoon.

The latest pattern

I thought I'd better do some 'blogging' today just to let the world (if there is anybody out there!) know what I'm up to!!! The new animal was looking very, very sad when I started back in on him on Monday evening. I'd got to the back legs and then got into one of those situations where deciding what technique and which way the back leg should bend stumped me. I did and un-did so many times that in spite of tatting, re-tatting and re-re-re-re-tatting I still couldn't get it to work. By the way, the front leg looks OK but probably needs to be a bit longer!
Tuesday evening I bit the bullet and went back to the offending leg and after several more attempts did a reasonable one!! It's not that good yet but it's good enough to 'improve' on, I hope! In the end cause I couldn't decide whether to show the other back leg or not I cut the thread and decided about half past eight to have a go at the head! Now any normal person would just do a sideways looking or full frontal head but this isn't really in the character of the animal. About three goes with several retro tats and I finally got a head. Crikey, I thought, that's awful!! I've just looked at it again in the 'light of day' and actually it's not bad. Still needs quite a lot of tweaking etc, though. I'm not going to add the picture yet as I'd like another good evening sorting out a few of the problems!! At the moment the pattern has to be worked in two parts and I cannot see a way to avoid this. I love to avoid starting and stopping so I shall take another look at this too.
Well, that's the story, so far!!! I want to finish this animal soon as it's been living in my head for about a year now!!!