Renulek's Rose #3

 Finished product first, of course.  

 

 

 

My hand for scale.  This is before I blocked it, so it's less flat and maybe even slight smaller than the finished size. 

 

This is the largest piece I have tatted, and the only one I have blocked so far.  Blocking tatting is somewhat more difficult and tedious than blocking knitted lace.  

 

Knit lace stretches, and you can get away with yanking on the edges and strategically pinning a few places in the center, if you like.  Tatting is inelastic, and all the picots need to be laid flat so they can settle down nicely.  

 

It turns out that when you have enough picots in one spot, the heads of pins physically get so close that it's hard to actually place pins properly.  And this doily was done with size 10 thread.  I don't think this blocking strategy will work as well for size 40 thread.  

 

I might have to iron pieces done with finer threads, honestly.  

 

I think ironing is the recommended blocking strategy for tatting, which makes a lot of sense.  I was concerned about the picots misbehaving (they did), but I think for finer thread tatting, the issues will be less noticeable.  

Is now a good time to mention that I used 600 pins, and still missed about a hundred or so picots? 

It took a very, very long time to get all the pins in. Thankfully, unpinning everything went much faster. 

Progress photos below!  

 

The first round completed: 

 

The second round.  The chains aren't as tight as they should be, and are flopping around too much.  This will be a recurring theme, and definitely something I'll be paying attention to in future pieces.  

 

I ran out of thread on a shuttle with just a few units of the third round left, unfortunately:

 

 

I think I just liked how cute the start of this round looked: 

 

 

The final round!  I immediately made a mistake in the very first part of the round, but didn't realize till I had made quite a bit of progress.  So I left it.  There's only two picots in the center of the left-most unit, but there should be three.  I don't think it looks terrible.  

 

 

This last round took a very long time.  The second through fifth rounds were alternating rings and chains, and the last round is... I guess still alternating rings and chains, but in a more dense pattern.  

 

 

Once again, running out of thread at the end of a round.  Very unfortunate.  

 

You can see that the doily gets more and more wobbly as things progress.  I think it would have laid more flat if I had been neater with my chains, ie pulled them a lot more tightly.  The last round being so flat on its own actually helps the flatness of the overall doily.  

I had a lot of fun with this doily.  I actually started the same pattern, but in size 40 thread.  I'm in the middle of the second round already, and am looking forward to the tatting!  I will do a size comparison between this size 10 thread doily and the one I'm working on now, as I'm curious how much smaller the doily will be.