Whoops

I very nearly forgot to show you the finished patchwork. How silly is that? I suppose it's typical of me - once a thing is finished it's of no interest to me!!

It turned out to be just the right size to use as a throw for the back of the sofa. Least it will be when I find it again!!!

I'm so pleased with this attempt at patchwork that I've started another!! 

No, not hexagons (well, not many) and no, not big either!!! I'll show you another day!!!

A teeny tiny snowflake pattern!

I've got a lot of Bob-eez (they seem to have many spellings!) with small amounts of HDT on them. I really, really need to free these up so I can wind on other new skeins of HDT that I've been given or bought over the past two trips abroad!!!! 

So, what to do with them? Well I decided to make this little star in my doodles section to put in my 'carry about with me' container which is always in my handbag.  Normally I carry two shuttles, loads of bobbins full of thread and make the little SCMR butterflies which fly out every time I tat in a public place.  Not that I do that a lot!!!

Then BC3 reminded me that it's almost the festive season!!!!  

Anyway - I realised that if I changed the little star slightly it would turn into a snowflake!!!   So, here it is OR here they are!!!  I can make these very quickly and will continue to bore you with them until I've released a few more Bob-eez!!!

Robin's snowflake

Today it's all about Robin's snowflake which is shown below.

I just happened to be 'quick off the mark' when she asked for test tatters and I must make some comments about her pattern.

It's really cool. Clear, precise and easy (even for somebody with only three brain cells) to follow and she uses standard notation which I really appreciate instead of calling 'stuff' new names which would cause me to be forever referring to the abbreviations. What I particularly LOVED about it is that it's only two pages. I despair of 'fancily written' patterns with lots and lots of white space and 'silly' fonts (not easy to read for old eyes) and GINORMOUS pictures/diagrams. I think the 'fashion' for these has come from an idea that if you sell a pattern the buyer expects 'lots of value for money' and the pattern is expanded as much as possible. I've often been tempted to buy patterns (well, sometimes!) and the thought of having pages and pages of 'fancy stuff' on oodles of pages with a veritable storm of snow white space just puts me right off.

I never ever print off patterns - not even my own. I really don't see the point of wasting ink and paper on something I may never do many times so I always work from the digital copy or scan a book page and work from that. Habit formed over years of writing the darn things down, losing bits of paper, finding them and then not being able to understand what I was on about!!!

Little box!

I'd forgotten this little box. This is a pattern that Judith Connors taught at the Fringe Tat Days. I was lucky enough to be in her lesson and started it off there. Finished it when I was at Terry's house and finally stiffened it when I got home to the UK.

It's a sweet little box and a joy to make. The flower on the top wasn't a good choice to make so one day I'll replace it with something better.

A bit of a teaser!!!!

Before you all start worrying - yes, I'm still tatting. Can't break the habit of almost a lifetime, can you?

Today I'm showing you further progress on the patchwork. This photo was taken a week or more ago so and is well out of date as the item is actually now finished!!!!

As you can see - this is the back of the 'whatever it is' with all the papers in.  I tried another way of sewing round the papers which I thought was a brilliant idea. 

It involved just turning the fabric over the paper and catching (just the fabric)  at each of the corners. This meant no sewing through the paper which made it much faster. BUT I soon found that the papers quickly 'popped out' when I was sewing the patches together   So I went back to the original method of sewing through the paper. Not that it bothered me and it was a good experiment. Maybe I did something wrong so I'll wait for guidance from proper patchwork people over where I went wrong!!!!