Larkspur and a lace bookmark

 

New hand dyed thread batch "Larkspur" is now listed in my Etsy shop. 

The colors were inspired by a delphinium (aka larkspur) flower in my garden.

Obviously not as vibrant as the beautiful, intensely saturated colors in that plant, but I did my best. I ordered new dye colors for this batch, choosing "Intense Blue" and "Blue Violet" from the Pro Chemical and Dye website. I always use fiber reactive dyes for my cotton threads.

______________________________

A bobbin lace project completed! The Caneground Bookmark pattern by Jenny Brandis. I really needed her clear, step-by-step instructions and excellent video demonstrations for every little bit of the process to get this done. I guess you could call it a "bucket list" wish to be able to learn bobbin lace. Some of my size 40 hand dyed thread is in this.

Tatting with gears and bobbin lace progress

 

From my "High Gear" pattern

This pair of earrings was tatted from Liz Metallic thread size 20, color number 311. I made several short videos while tatting this pair. Three of them are on my TikTok profile, and I just added a one minute video demonstrating a self-closing mock ring around a bead to YouTube as a short. The earrings have been listed in my Etsy Shop, and the pattern "High Gear" has been there awhile.

There has been some progress in my new hobby of bobbin lace. The pattern that I'm working on now is by Jenny Brandis. She has many instructional videos on YouTube and a lovely Etsy shop as well.

My first attempt at a Jenny Brandis bobbin lace pattern

I've removed some of the pins in the lace already completed to better see how the colors are interacting with the pattern. Mind you, I was really clueless about what would happen with the colors when I started. They didn't stay neatly in place like the simpler pattern that I tried in my previous post. But, now that I can see the color mixing it's like a painting! I love it! 

I'm using mainly size 40 Lizbeth and some of my hand dyed thread. This is thicker than the recommended thread for the pattern, so I enlarged the pattern to 115% and it seems that's about right. Jenny Brandis includes a lot of helpful information with her patterns, so that's how I learned about resizing the pattern to fit the thread.