Doily Progress in Blue and White and White and Blue

 Hello!

The last couple weeks have been busy ones (shocker--you can read about it here, here, here and here if you like) but I have found a bit of time to make progress on The Big Doily. 

 Unfortunately, my tension troubles have continued to plague me on this doily:

So it was back to the ironing board and another dunking for the doily:

Of course, this left me without a tatting project, so I decided to take a second crack at the still unfinished frilling doily to try to find out what went wrong...

First I tried to relax the frills out, but to no avail...

Still Frilly

So I went back to the pattern...and instantly realized my mistake. Too many rings + chains = doily frills. Sigh. I think it's funny, this is the picture that accompanies the pattern in The Tatter's Treasure Chest:

I think my frilling doily matches this lovely lady's skirt!

So, I started over.

Center Motif

Round 1

Round 2--this is where I started going wrong last time--if you look carefully you can see that the rings are attached in an every-other pattern--one ring is attached to the center picot of the chain, the next two rings are to the first and third picots. That pattern is repeated all the way around. On my first crack at this pattern I added two rings to each chain.

Here are some comparison shots for you, first and second try:

Already a frilled mess...

Look Ma, no frills! (Or not much of one, anyway!)

 Since I decided to take my husband's advice and make The Big Doily white with blue accents, I thought I would make this one in blue with white accents. So, Round 3 is white:

 And kind of frilly. So...to the ironing board it went, to replace the newly-dry Big Doily. I am officially a convert to the mid-work blocking:

 You may notice the picture is a little...dark...that would be because I finished this round and blocked this in the middle of a blackout!

I used my headlamp to see what I was doing!

So here's what it looks like so far...the blocking helped, but it's still a little over-lappy as you can see at the top.

I'm hoping that will continue to relax out as I continue to tat, but on any level, this is MUCH better than the previous try:

 So that's where I'm at. I started back on The Big Doily when I put the new one on the board to dry, switching to blue. This round is not completed yet, but you can see where it's going...I'm curious, which do you like better? Blue and White or White and Blue?

:)