Three Crosses

Considering the sale is being run by a church group, I figure crosses should go over pretty well.

On the left is Mary Konior's "Small Cross" from Tatting with Visual Patterns. I made it in Lizbeth color 651 Medium Blue and LadyShuttleMaker's "Diablo". Yeah, that's right, I made a cross out of a thread named after the devil, and I live in an area where lightning is common in the summer. My inspiration for this color combination? Well, you know, in MK's diagrams the rings are red and the chains are blue.

In the middle is Mary Konior's "Large Cross" from the same book. If I had used the same size threads, the "large" cross would indeed have been bigger than the "small" one; however, I used size 20 for the first one and size 80 for the second one, so the relative sizes of the two crosses are reversed. The threads for this one are Tatskool's "Antique Bronze" on the shuttle and "Cloves" on the ball. It was nice to use size 80 thread after all the size 20 I've been using lately. I find that size 20 puts a strain on my hands and I have to take breaks more often, whereas I can tat with size 80 all day long. This pattern gave me a bit of grief, though; I got 3/4 of the way through it before I realized that the reason it wasn't lying flat was because I was joining the clovers on the long arm in the wrong place. At that point, the easiest thing to do was to trash it and start all over, painful though it was to discard hand-dyed thread.

On the right is a design that has been published in various forms by many different people; you could say it's one of those "traditional" tatting patterns, like Hen and Chicks, except that I don't know if this one has ever been given a name. I got the pattern from the book Christmas Angels and other Tatting Patterns by Monica Hahn. I did have to make a change to the pattern. Hahn had the chains in the corners the same length as all the others, which resulted in their being all smooshed on top of each other. I shortened these chains by several stitches and put just 2 picots on them instead of 3. I should have just put one picot on these chains, as they still overlap just a little, but it's OK as it is; in any case, it's way better than it looks in the book. I used Lizbeth white and Krystledawne's "Twilight Grape". I love the colors, but I must say it was a sore trial going back to size 20.