I'm Back, and It's Finished

Well, when I say I'm back, I never actually went anywhere, I just didn't blog for a while.

I sort of left you hanging with that last post, didn't I? Some of you may have guessed from the timing and the secretiveness that those pink things had something to do with Mother's Day, and many realized that they were the petals for Linda Davies' Stargazer Lilies.

After finishing the tatting, the petals (and the leaves, which I added) needed to be glued to short lengths of floral wire. I used Aleene's Flexible Stretchable glue.

While the glue was drying, I used floral tape to attach the stamens (which were "boughten", as my great-grandmother would have said) to a slightly heavier gauge floral wire.

Once the glue was dry, I used more tape to attach the petals around the stamens.

So there are the finished flowers, but what were they for? My mom is very sensitive to the sun, so she wears a lot of wide-brimmed hats, and she has a very particular style. I found this crocheted hat on Amazon, of all places.

It's a very nice hat, providing good sun protection yet breathable, and with a wire around the edge for shaping; and one of my mom's favorite colors, too. It's just a little plain, though, isn't it?

So I took some plain pin backs...

...attached the flowers to them...

...and pinned them to the hat.

This looked pretty good as it was, but a little empty (this was at least partly because I used size 40 thread instead of the size 20 the pattern calls for; but size 20, I felt, would have made the flowers too big). Plus, although you can't really see it in this photo, the pins really showed too much. I realized I would need a few more "boughten" items to fill in the gaps and cover the pins, so I went to Jo-Ann's, walked up and down every aisle twice, and chose these:

The flowers have little twist-ties on the back for attaching, and the butterflies have alligator clips. I poked the twist-ties through the holes in the hat so that these flowers would be between the tatted ones and covering the pins, and clipped one of the butterflies to one of the tatted lilies, and here is the final result.

Last week, I saw my parents and was able to deliver the hat in person-- only three months late, which is pretty good in our family!

I may not have been blogging lately, but I have been tatting, so I will show some other items soon.