Another Eleanora and a Diagram

My first doiley from Iris Neibach's book Tatted Doilies was Beatrice...you may remember I made it in Flora 20 bright yellow and the in my Apple Blossom 20 I chose it because it looked to be the easiest and because others had posted about it so it must be OK.Having got the knack of the one round into the centre and out again..yes it was easy and straightforward.

The next one I chose was Eleanora because that looked easy too. Well I was wrong it wasn't easy at all!!
My trial in Flora 20 was a masterpiece of untatting! I had printed a pale copy of the photo and coloured it in but even when I had completed it I was not too sure how I had actually done it.

Inattention to the diagram in the book caused my first mistake, tatting the chain past Ring 3 which is thrown off it...untat back a lot...wont do that again.

Then there were several places where I would finish a chain, tat the next ring and the realise that I was going in the wrong direction for the next chain to be made. Untat again and use the other shuttle for the ring and I was fine.

For my second attempt I realised that it would be a good idea to colour my diagram according to which shuttle I was using and after that it was a doddle!!

I asked Iris if I could show you my diagram and she was happy with that, so here it is.



The rings are numbered consequitively so you can follow the flow easily. You can see where to change shuttles, the red parts are made using Shuttle 1 as the working shuttle and the green parts use Shuttle 2 as the working shuttle.

This is not the way I would normally colour a diagram...proof of this is that I made the mistake of telling you that it was like this on the diagram that I made for the Christmas motif in my last post. Not so..that was the colour that the rings and chains would look like in the finished item...I have corrected this.

Well I fooled myself too as for my next attempt I decided to use Apple Blossom 40 and a co-ordinating green and imagined it looking like my diagram with a green outer edge.

Silly, silly me!!!

It actually looks like this...





I am not used to tatting in anything other than 20 so it looked TINY!



Colour balance difficult to get right on that photo and they wont both fit on the scanner.
Second thing to strike me was how different the Apple Blossom looked. I designed it to be mostly pinks with just a hint of green leaves and now suddenly it was mainly green.



Wow! just shows the different ways to use HDT's.