I wasted a lot of time today one day surfing around but I'll show you the results of that in another post. I ended up checking my blog links because at the end of my list are several that do not have RSS feeds so they don't show up at the top when they're updated. There are also a few blogs that haven't been touched in nearly two years now so I guess I should delete them.

Amongst the live links but not showing updated is Bina Madden's website. I was delighted to see a butterfly pattern dedicated to Wilma Walker. So I printed it out and made a few notes on it to tat it tonight that night.

In the delightful synchronicity that I live in, when I got home, I found the latest issue of Tatting Times, a quarterly publication by Karey Solomon, and inside what did I find, but lo and behold ~ the very same pattern!

That meant I HAD to tat it, right?

Bina writes an excellent column in the I.O.L.I. Bulletin about tatting, btw. I think Bina is a brilliant designer. What I've noticed about Bina and a few other brilliant designers is that they seem to have engineering minds. They can't help it. They need to be challenged. They see every line, curve, angle and proportion of space. Their minds are always ticking and their fingers clicking (with shuttle sounds, of course).

I work from a different perspective. Not better or worse, just different. Not brilliant either, just different. I believe in the KISS principle. KEEP IT SUPREMELY SIMPLE! ( I don't use that other word.) So when Bina throws in larks head knots and front and back tatting and such, I just sort of zone out. Don't get me wrong - she does the same thing with my patterns. So what we each do is adapt the pattern to fit our personal tatting tastes. That's not a bad thing. I'd rather someone adapt my patterns to suit their way of tatting than to not tat it at all. Of course, it does take a certain amount of experience and skill to know how to do that - so keep learning everything you can.

That's why I made notes on the pattern when I printed it out. She was doing FS/BS tatting and a few other things. I just wanted to know how many stitches in each element. There weren't numbers on the diagram so I had to read the pattern and figure out the stitch count. If you've ever tatted Jan Stawasz's patterns, another brilliant designer, you know what I mean. I LOVE his designs but tat very few of them because I have to rewrite them in terms I can tat from.

So I tatted the butterfly.

Twice.


I was a little confused by the difference in numbers from top to bottom which I knew was the FS/BS notation but I didn't always interpret it right. It turned out pretty good except I made a join wrong at the very bottom. I also had to reverse the order of the half stitches of the ruffles depending on the direction I was going in to make sure they all turned the same way.

So I tatted it again. I really didn't like the ruffly effect on the last wing chain and I was going to change it to picots but I didn't. I got sidetracked just as I was beginning the wings on version 2 with some personal issues and didn't get back to it til last night. I'd lost my motivation by then. Other than that, it's pretty much the same, I think. I finally got around to blocking it a bit ago but I did fix those bottom rings.