Tatting, necklace, painting, watercolor

This past week was dedicated to tatting this necklace from Yarnplayer's blog. The necklace is fairly easy to make. builds up quickly and looks good ! So I would say it makes a perfect gift. You can have many different colors of it matching your different dresses too :)

Also, I have not yet given up on watercoloring. Yes, I am hopeful one day I can be proud of what I paint ! ;) For the time being, I am just practicing and enjoying what this world can bring out in me. Here is one:

Tatted bracelet

The inspiration for my new creation comes from a post here.
I got the idea and twisted it a bit by adding beads in the joins. This is one of the very few tattings I have done with beads that boosted my self confidence cause I always taught I'm not good with beads ! Its a very easy pattern and makes a gorgeous bracelet.

As I am getting more comfortable with tatting I am wondering about sharing my experience with other locals...May be like a meetup session that we could gather and see each other's works or learn a few things from each other ? I live in Toronto and I'm not sure how many visitors I have from Toronto but if you are out there interested in doing such a meetup please leave a comment and I'd be more than glad to follow up !

Failed Tatting, Successful Watercolor

I have been living in the worlds of tatting and watercolor simultaneously recently...Not two very related topics I know ! But I am trying to make it work :)

Having said that, I didn't quite succeeded in the tatting pattern I was working on. It was going very well until the very last part where I joined two ends of the tatting earlier than I should. I love the pattern though. You can find it here. I am very sad that I ruined it with carelessness. I might come back to it again and re-tat it..

But the watercolor attempt was a success. I came up with the design and color myself. I like to draw several copies of it and experiment different shades and coloring on it.

Sketch it and watercolor it

I know this weblog is all about tatting but I somehow seem to have developed an appetite for water color.  Well to be fair I can't ignore the very helpful source that I found recently in developing this appetite.

Since I saw this tutorial here I decided to sketch and paint it myself. I finally did ! I changed the coloring as I thought the original painting was too red for my taste...I guess I can still play more with the colors to find a better balance and harmony...maybe next time :)

A rather new start with Watercolor

Since I remember I have always been interested in painting and among all, very in favor of watercolor pairings. I think somehow fear of failure prevented me from even starting ...

I can't say the fear is gone or even I started watercolor painting but what I did last week could be a small stepping stone for what might come next :) Here it is :

The idea comes from a very interesting art blog I found recently. And this water color painting was shown step by step in her blog. I really like her art projects and it was her work that made me start what i always wanted to experience : water color painting !

Tatted Doily : Trinity

I posted an unsuccessful attempt of a tatted doily on my blog a while back. At the time I got tired of so much trying that I gave up. I went back to re-tat it and finally got something out of it :)

As you see the picots that connect the middle circle to the rest of the doily are a little too long :( but except that the rest looks good. I post the pattern here again in case you are interested. Just make sure your picots are not as long as mine ;)

Starfish Pendant

A new idea for a pendant struck my mind yesterday and I eagerly started to give it life outside my mind. Its a simple pattern overall and uses Self Closing Mock Ring technique(SCMR). I have learnt about SCMR recently and I must say they are a really powerful technique that can add lots of verity to your tatting works. Here is the result

 Here is a diagram showing this tatting pattern:

* Start with a SCMR: C5, R(5- place bead and hold it with a paper clip - 5), C7, R(5- join to the bead in the previous ring- 5) , C5 Close SCMR
C5
repeat steps from * five times


For those of you who are not familiar with SCMR here is a video that helped me in learning SCMR :