A (Tatting) Tragedy

Oh hello. Last time I checked, it was October...then I blinked, and suddenly it's 2016!!! Yikes.

The end of the school year (December) got crazy, then summer travel took over, and now it's the beginning of the school year, so free time feels like it doesn't exist.

With all that, I haven't been very productive. I've mostly focused on two (what should be) big projects, both of which have ended up as big duds. (Tatting tragedies, if you will).

The first isn't so much of a tragedy, but more of a summer-time flop.

I started one of Jan Stawasz's 8-sided doilies in size 100 thread at the beginning of summer, and got fairly far...

Unfortunately I went to refill my shuttles and realized I couldn't remember which ball of miniscule white thread I'd started with...I thought it was size 100, then came to realize that I had an almost identical ball of size 80, and the threads were just different enough (but also so remarkably similar) that I decided to just leave it. That sounds rather defeatist now that I think about it, but I didn't want to get to the point where I was stuck with half the doily done in obviously the wrong thread.

So then I moved onto another doily, this time in blue size 80 (so I knew I could keep track of the thread). THIS is the tatting tragedy...

The doily is from this book:

which took me a while to track down (I had to find it on the Internet, it's apparently not available anywhere in the Eastern side of Russia), so I'd been waiting a long time to make one of these doilies.

I looked through the book and, even though my Russian is pretty terrible, it's good enough to read the numbers, a few of the directions, and of course the patterns are diagrammed.

So, I began, with this small center motif:

 Count with me...do you see five sides to this motif? Because that's how many I see...

My rendition--with five sides to the center motif.

So on I went, on my merry way, tatting along...almost finished, as a matter of fact...

Until today, when I realized there was something terribly, horribly wrong.

On the final round, each "motif" attaches to the doily on three chains in a row. I realized today that, if I continued in this way, I would have one chain floating--I had one chain too many!!

I went back and checked--I had been attaching the final round correctly, so that wasn't the issue.

I re-checked the pattern, all the way to the center motif...

Yes, I've done that correctly, too--five sides on my center motif, just like the pattern.

Then I looked very, very carefully at the center motif of author's photo of this doily...the original picture is about 2" by 2", so it's rather hard to see...

Here is a blown-up photo of that center motif

How many sides do you count on the center motif now? Oh, 6? Hmmmm.

TRAGEDY!!!!!!

I followed the pattern, but the pattern was wrong! It's six sides, not five!! UGHHHH!!!

So, now the doily is just a big mess, so wrong in all the ways, and I'm a little distraught, because I have steriously been working on that stupid thing for at least a month, and wanted to enter it in the Canberra Show this weekend, and now it's WRONG!!!!! Oh the humanity!

... OK so I do know this isn't the end of the world, but I'm so, so sad about it right now. I really liked this pattern, and I really wanted to see how this doily was going to look when it was done.

And I really, really don't want to do all that work again.

Le sigh.