under the sea

I needed a break from white and snowflakes and tatted some sea creatures.

The gold fish is based on Ninetta (Antonina Caruso)'s adorable Kissing Minnows edging - pattern is here. I really like how the eye is made - a Josephine knot above the fish's head which is then twisted around the core while you make the next stitch so that it lies inside the fish.  Very clever.

The purple fish are based on Phyllis Schmidt's "Fish - Paperclip" pattern, which makes a cute quick paperclip bookmark.  I skipped the bead eye, removed the paperclip, and added some fins on the bottom.  I can't find her blog, but google was able to find the pattern here.  

[Side rant: The writeup for this pattern was distributed as a PDF and did not list the source location. Please, authors, please always include your site inside your PDF patterns!  Not having that information makes it very hard to find your site again and for people to link back to you to give you credit later!]

Then I made up a couple seahorses and a starfish to go with.  My first try on the seahorse did not go well - turns out I didn't actually know how the distinctive parts of a seahorse, the curly tail and pointy nose and funny fin on the back, went together exactly.  I looked up some photos online and the second and third ones look much more recognizable, though I think there's still room for improvement for a perfect little seahorse.

Adelheid Dangela's Gent motif

This is 'Gent' from Adelheid Dangela's book Occhi-Patchwork and More.  I really like the shape.

I've mentioned before that I find it irritating when a center rosette ends with a split ring to climb out to the next round, resulting in one of the rings pointing the opposite way from the others (I worked the one above in two rounds instead of climbing out).  And I wondered what would happen visually if ALL of the rings of the rosette were flipped the other way.  I tried experimenting on this motif.

Upper left: The original, no split ring (larger image at top of post).
Upper right: Original, climbing out with a split ring (the split ring is at the top - at 12'o clock).
Lower right: First experiment.  Since the center rings are all 5-5-5-5, I tried 5-3-4-3-5; the space in the center of the rosette is too large, but the rings are pleasingly round.
Lower left: Second experiment.  I used 7-3-2-3-7, to make the center rosette smaller and the free end larger.  Much closer, visually, to the original even though the rings are still slightly larger.  I'm pleased with how it came out and may try this on other snowflakes.  However, with a zoomed out view to see all four of them, I'm realizing that perhaps I am being needlessly picky and it doesn't matter so much that one of the rings is slightly different when climbing out.  After all, working the rosette separately results in a small irregularity where I tie the ends (perhaps I should be working on my finishing instead. ;)

As someone who collects snowflake patters, I liked Adelgeid's first book, Occhi-Patchwork, more than Occhi-Patchwork and More, as it had more large hexagon "snowflake" motifs.  This pattern is the only large hexagon from this book; the others are smaller hexagons, triangles, diamonds, etc. to be joined together into larger mats (some of which are quite impressive).  Her books are nicely put together, with diagram patterns and colorful illustrations of the motifs in larger mats.