Practicing With False Plaits and First Fair Ribbons! :)

 Well hello!

 I finally got back on the tatting train this week, practicing the shuttle motions with false plaits. I'm pretty sure my chaining skills are pretty solid now...so I suppose I need to make a whole bunch of trefoils now to practice my ring skills! :)

 Anyway, here are my false plaits:

 The pattern is 8 ds of one color, rw, 8 ds of the other color, then holding both shuttles 1 ds, rw, 1 ds, then repeat until you have the length you desire. Then start all over and do it all again, until you have two strands of the same length.

Of course, I ended up with some tension troubles and funky twisting going on:

Eh, oh well. :)

 My strands of false plaits ended up really long, almost a yard each:

Next I weaved the strands together by laying one strand on top of the other (opposite colors together)

 and pull the top strand through the bottom strand, over and over and over to make a braided effect...

 Good times!

Of course, the tension troubles made some of the circles want to twist, so at a certain point I let the same side colors twist together, making one side all white and one side all blue:

(split colors on the left, braided on the right)

This seems like such a nice cord, I decided to make something usable; a new lanyard for my ID badge at work, which is why I made the strands so long!

Actually, as I went along I noticed that it kind of reminded me of the friendship bracelets I made when I was a kid--the ones where you make the 4 and slide the knots up...which now that I think about it, making those 4s was like making an un-flipped half of a double stitch...

Whoa. Mind blown! :)

Anyway, that's that. I have a couple of gifts I need to work this week, so hopefully I'll have something more interesting to show you soon!

I also had some good news from Iowa this week...I won some ribbons at the Southern Iowa Fair!

One of the joys of being with the State Department is that, while we live most of the year in other parts of the world, our official residency and address for all the important things (voting, taxes, and Fair entries) remains in Iowa!

So, I still get to enter my tatting in the Fairs! :)

I just have to get creative about how I get the work to the Fair...this year, since I'm still in Russia right now, I mailed it to my awesome mom and she took it to the judges!

Here are my ribbons!

Tatted jewelry: Blue (It's the brown bracelet I designed a few months ago)

 The colored bookmark in the corner is mine as well--and also won blue! (This was my motif #7--the opposite side is the same pattern tatted in cream to make a corner bookmark-the pattern is from Tatting by Cathy Bryant). Actually, I guess this was up for the overall best of show prize, but it didn't win. Eh, you can't win them all! :)

 The pillowcase edging (motif #14) showed up as well, and also won blue! Unfortunately you can't see it very well in the picture, but I will upload another picture of it in a few weeks...

Amazingly the baby bib also won a blue ribbon...I guess they really do judge the tatting and not the applique technique! :) Thanks again for the great TIAS pattern, Jane!

 And, of course, there's The Big Doily. Another blue, and again this year, I need to point out how AWESOME MY MOM IS!!!

 I sent her the doily folded into quarters, but she was told that this Fair prefers doilies to be mounted, so my mom cut out some cardboard and re-blocked the doily for competition...and unfortunately will have to un-do all that work before the next Fair!

She is so great!!! XOXO Mom!

The red ribbon was for the mobile, which was in an "other than mentioned" needlework category and lost to something I can't remember (mom told me) but I'm sure was really great. Unfortunately, I don't have a picture of that right now.

I was also really glad to see that someone else had entered some tatting this year!! The category was new at this fair last year because two years ago I wanted to enter some tatting but there was no tatting category...but then they created the category the following year! Last year I was the only entrant, but you can see that someone else entered in the first fair photo above (on the white plate.)

Yay! Tatting is picking up in Southern Iowa! :)