My progress thus far

Essentially, my plan had been to either tat/study all day today.

Neither got done--and I'll tell you why.

About a week ago, my iTunes decided that it would be a fantastic idea to go absolutely ballistic and:

1. Switch around the names of all of my songs
2. Refuse to organize them by any category other than genre

So, me, being a fabulous mix of: worry wart, chicken, mildly more computer proficient than average, stubborn as he** and seriously pissed off, decided that I'd figure out how to fix it and be on my merry way. 

Long story short, I reinstalled iTunes--twice, moved about 70% of my songs to my cloud drive (sans cloud control panel since my poor little first gen iphone is too old to have it), leaving the rest because I decided last minute that it would be better to just backup the library and so on. Finally, after the second reinstall, I decided to try to create a new library.

That worked, but the problem is that while it gave me access to those songs on my cloud drive, I now had to sift through my back up to figure out which songs I had missing. 

I just finished, and it's almost 1:30 in the morning. 

-_-

Good thing is that as far as I know, all is merry and well!  

^_^

So...

I got over it. 

After taking a good, long and hard look at it, I've decided to keep on with this round of Evelyn's Doily.

^_^

Okay, see here's what I'm going to do.

I did this with duna (btw, I'm probably gonna scrap that last round, too), and I'm gonna give it a shot with Evelyn's doily. 

Since I still have enough room left on the round to leave me more than a few repetitions of the "motifs", I'm going to cut the shuttles off (leaving enough thread to connect back onto, of course) and start working on the next repetition with a whole new design. 

If it doesn't work, I can just reconnect with the original version. 

If it does work, I'll scrap the original version, and try to do my best to save as much of the thread (a considerable amount, mind you) that has already gone into the round. 

Hopefully, I'll have pictures of it by saturday. 

^_^

Return of the needle lace?

So, a while ago I found that big piece of canvas that I used to practice my needle lace stitches on. (Yay!). At first, I was like "eh" -- I'd given up needle lace, right?

Enter a topic of my last few posts: needle lace with tatting thread 0.o

Before embarking on any sort of project, I decided to give the ol' stitch sample routine a try.

Not too bad, huh? 

As you guys know, my eyes aren't exactly the best on the market--which means that I was very happy to see how much larger the stitches are with tatting thread. 

I can actually see them! 

To give you guys an example of what I mean, observe: 

There's a little bit of a difference, if I do say so myself. 

The second sample (on the left) is in Gutermann #50 thread, and it has the same number of rows as my #30 Omega tatting thread.

O.O

Bolstered by these results, I decided to whip out one of my old (and barely started) needle lace projects. It only had the outline, so it wasn't too hard to rip out and redo. 

I'd like to point out that I'm using the scraps from my previous tatting projects, so this will probably end up looking like a hungover rainbow. 

^_^

I feel obliged to say...

... that this last round of Evelyn's doily is driving me up the wall. 

Like seriously driving me up the wall. 

I dread to even go near it. 

I'm about halfway through the round, maybe a little less, and I've realized that the really long chains that tend to pop up in almost everything I design are back and they're biting me on the keister. 

Grrr. v_v

I'm seriously debating scrapping the round and starting over, but I can't make up my mind. My problem is that I can't even tell if it looks cool enough to constitute a tolerance of the growing pain-in-the-a** factor. 

If anyone's out there, reading my lil' ol' blog, what do you guys think?

Yay or nay on the scrapping? 

-_-

Anywho, on to happier things. 

I think I might take up needle lace again. I'm currently undertaking a super secret project of monumental awesomeness that may or may not go out in a flaming ball of fire. 

I, for one, think it won't--but that's just me.

Maybe, just maybe, I might get up the guts to post a picture soon! 

^_^

A little more than nothing =)

So, I realized yesterday that I did in fact have something to post about ^_^

First of all, I think I'm gonna call this one "lotusness". It reminds me of these bizarre backgrounds I'd downloaded back when I was learning HTML, and even though they looked nothing like lotuses (lotusi?), they were called that. 

Behold! 

Aaaaand, remember this ol' guy? 

I remembered that despite having worked on it in little bits here and there, I hadn't actually posted an updated picture in forever and a day--and le masterpiece has actually changed a lot! 

Also, before I moved I managed to squeeze in one thread dyeing project that I completely forgot about. The thing is, that I keep forgetting that my yellow dye isn't completely dissolved and add waaaaaay more than I'm supposed to. 

It was supposed to be blue and gold. 

You can't really tell in the picture, but there are splashes of red and green in there that make it look like ketchup, mustard, and relish look like when you spread them onto a burger/hot dog. 

Ergo, "ketchup and mustard".

It actually looks kind of cool in person. 

^_^

---

Okay, so, honest straight up truth? I've got didly flippedy squat to talk about in the lace-made-by-me category. 

However, check this oooooooooooouuuuuuuuuuuuuuuttttttttttt:

http://needlelacetalk.ning.com/photo/bright-birds-new?xg_source=activity

-sigh-

It's things like this that make me wish I had the power of microscopic vision instead of the power of making my optometrist freak out trying to find a place that sells contacts with my prescription.

>_<

I do feel like whipping out ol' masterpiece, though... might be rather cathartic until the headache kicks in. 

^_^