The Fourth, Fifth and 6th of December...Finally Catching Up!

Packout is (almost) done, it's the weekend and I finally have time to tat!

I am still working my way through Lene Bjørn's "24 Snowflakes in Tatting"--after this weekend I am up to December 6!

The snowflake above is December 4, a nice flake that tatted up pretty quickly, which is good since I am so far behind!

The Fifth of December is another nice flake, but one that needs to be blocked out to lay nicely... And unfortunately all my blocking supplies are packed away in boxes like this:

So I improvised:

I finished the Sixth of December today:

This was a really fun one to tat, full of lock joins, shoelace tricks, false chains and switching shuttles. 

This is one of the reasons I would consider this book an intermediate tatting book, because it is assumed that you know how to so many of these skills without much explanation (lock joins and false chains aside--Bjørn includes an excellent "how-to tutorial on these, as well as how to do false picots, add beads (utilized only once in the book), ring on ring tatting (what I would call an SSSR + thrown ring), and chain on chain (block) tatting. Other inclusions are an explanation of symbols and list of materials needed (she suggests AIDA size 20 thread) with glass beads being one of the only suggested notions listed. 

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Of course we are quickly winding down our time in Russia (less than a week?!) and last Friday was our goodbye party at the Consulate.

For my going away present, I was gifted this BEAUTIFUL Russian shawl:

And Chris received his very own Ded Moroz

Who very kindly offered to display some of this weekend's efforts:

On to the Seventh of December! :)