Tatterly's Heart

My next heart is one I've been wanting to tat for years - the printout says 1999 on it! The link no longer exists but I found one with the Wayback Machine and you can find it here. It is a design by Dianna Stevens. (update - forgot to mention the name of this pattern is Tatterly's Heart.) UPDATE - if the link does not work for you, copy and paste the following into a separate window:
http://web.archive.org/web/20071111170606/http://members.aol.com/DomestArts/Heartinst.html
I tatted this one in Manuela size 20 and color 124. It's about 3" wide and 2 1/2" tall.

I didn't like the way the loose rings flopped around. It made it hard to keep track of what was joined where. Dianna designed it in 1998 and I do think it is such a delicate looking heart but I wondered if it wouldn't look even better in a finer thread.

So I went to DMC size 80, color 3706. The number of stitches is consistent on each ring so I added side picots to join the rings to each other which kept them from flopping around. If you look close on the bigger one, you can see the petals are mostly unjoined. I don't think it really has a visual impact on the finished heart either way, but it was so much easier to keep track of where I was and where to join. The smaller heart is 2 1/4" wide and 1 3/4" high. I thought it would be even smaller. It does look dainty though! This might have to go on something for my granddaughter to-be in May!

Here's a shot with the two hearts together. There are several split rings in this too. I was just wondering about the chains maybe being green and the petals a flower color but that would just get too fiddly with all those split rings. Yeah...SSSR...but I'm a great believer in "if it ain't fun, don't do it".

And once again....I'm up WAY TOO LATE!!!