Hard Heart

I saw this motif on Ninetta Caruso's pattern page and fell in love with it, especially the hearts in the center.

But this was not an easy tat by any means.  Each heart had 64 double stitches.  After about 20 stitches it got hard to pull extra thread through to continue the ring.  And then pulling the ring tight without twisting it was a real challenge.  Luckily there were only 4 hearts.  The rest of the motif was a real joy.  And I must say I am happy with the results.  But this motif did not go well from the beginning.  My original plan was to make the center hearts and rings solid pink and the outer rings and chains the variegated Girly Girl color you see in the picture.  But when I started winding the shuttle with the variegated thread, I turned off my brain and started thinking about how I hated sewing in ends...and about how pretty the colors were...and a million other things that were going through my mind during the mindless shuttle winding process.  Before I knew it, I had a second shuttle half-way wound CTM with the same thread, so I figured why not tat the whole thing in variegated.  The heart motif on top is by Anne Bruvord and is found here.

Speaking of Anne Bruvord hearts, here is the completed heart bookmark that I showed you in the last post.

I love how this picture turned out.  I put the shuttle on the scanner to show scale, then put a blue piece of construction paper on top as a contrasting color so that the bookmark would show up.  But there was so much space between the paper and the scanner that it shows up as black with just a little blue around the edges.  But I love how this bookmark turned out.  It is tatted in vintage Coats & Clark size 70 thread in white, shades of pink, and solid pink.

And finally, I'm a little behind on the TIAS.  Here is what mine looks like after day 9.

I'm still seeing some kind of character with a pointy had and beard, like an elf or gnome, but it is still way up in the air.  It could be anything.