When I was at JoAnn Fabrics the other day, I noticed they had all their Lizbeth thread on clearance for $1.97/ball. Since I've gotten bad balls from both JoAnn's and Hobby Lobby, I'm suspicious of these particular lots but I didn't have Caribbean and it's pretty so I bought it. It split on me once as I finished one motif, but otherwise, so far, no problems. But I'm less than 10 yards into the ball too. LOL! I hate being so skeptical but I've had NO problems with the ones I got from ZigZag Corner. Only the ones I've picked up more recently from local outlets.

(Update! Thank you Marty! The snowflake is from Mike and the pattern is HERE!)
Anyway, I tatted two motifs last night. One is from a vintage publication and I'll rewrite the pattern and offer that at some point later. The swirly snowflake was from a printout I had, and I'm pretty sure the designer is a guy and I think his name is Bob (maybe Biker Bob?) but it's not anywhere on the printout. It used to be that when I printed something from the computer, the website, at least, printed at the bottom. That doesn't happen much lately as so many websites are "print-friendly" and it's possible I copied and pasted the instructions onto a blank word document to avoid all the "extra" stuff. So...if someone, including the designer, will let me know who they are, I will be happy to add his information here!(Thanks again to Marty from Tat's All She Wrote.)

That said, I really like the Caribbean in the swirly snowflake pattern, but not the vintage snowflake pattern. See how the colors work out in the swirly but are disjointed in the vintage one? I had tons of thread on the shuttle after the swirly so that's why I tatted the vintage one. I'll do it again in white or a solid since it's for a project. The colorway repeat was good for one design but not another and this is the pitfall with colorful threads.

The other thing I wanted to demonstrate here was how the motif looks on different backgrounds. I actually have them on white too, but in my editing, I accidently saved one motif and lost the other so I didn't include it in the collage. I have lots of small cardstock that I use for background scans, especially for white pieces that don't show up. I put the motif on several shades of blue but it fades away into the darker blue so I didn't even scan that one. The gray is actually a gray-blue. The green and peach made the motif stand out better, but sometimes odd colors pull out shades you really don't want to see.

I actually like the swirly on the sky blue background. The vintage motif didn't look good on any of them but it's because of the imbalance of color distribution in the motif, not the background so much.

And that's my experiment of the day!