More Insect Repellent

As promised, I've completed another sachet to repel insects in my apartment. This time I used the medallion from Jon Yusoff's "Sweetheart Set". Here's a link to Jon's blog. There used to be a link to buy the Sweetheart Set; I can't find it anymore, but I'm sure you could e-mail Jon if you're interested. The set includes this medallion, a snowflake, a bookmark, and an edging.

The colors are Lizbeth 606 Charcoal and 137 Berry Burst, size 20.

This is another example of a design where the use of two colors brings out a whole new aspect of the design. Well, not really new, since Jon shows it in two colors on the pattern, but you can imagine how different it would look with just one color. I think the dark gray outlining the bright variegated thread also gives it a stained-glass sort of look, and I was pleasantly surprised at how symmetrically the variegated colors fell out.

As with the Fandango motif, I sewed this to an organza drawstring bag, which I then filled with bay leaves and rosemary to repel insects. If you sew your tatting to these organza bags, I recommend using invisible thread. That way you can just move from one picot to the next and not worry about the sewing thread showing. As noted recently by Carollyn, it's also easier if you pin the tatting in place then turn the bag inside out to do the sewing. (By the way, do check out Carollyn's blog; she has lots of interesting projects going on.) Then just be sure not to pull the stitches too tightly so the bag doesn't pucker.

It's kind of hard to photograph these bags, they are so shiny. I had to play around with the brightness and color saturation quite a bit, but in the end I managed to get a couple of decent pictures.

Here it is in my kitchen, hanging from the spice rack, which has a row of Shaker-style pegs along the bottom. The way it's hanging from two pegs here is only a pose for the photo. Really, I have both drawstrings looped over one peg (the one on the far right), since the other oven mitt hangs on the other peg. For some reason, the bag simply won't hang straight with both drawstrings on the same peg (the one I put in the bathroom hangs just fine that way). I've decided not to let this bother me as long as the sachet is doing its job, but I did want to be able to take one picture of it hanging straight.

By the way, when I say bay leaves, I am talking about the dried leaves of the bay laurel tree. I gather that in some parts of Asia, there are other leaves than might also be called bay leaves. I don't know whether these other leaves also have insect repellent qualities, but the bay laurel leaves in combination with rosemary work quite well.