Corn and Chaff

I couldn’t get a better photo, but isn’t it a pretty pattern?

I finally got the pattern for the Corn and Chaff design by Mary Konior!! Apparently Corn and Chaff is considered a braid and is worked from side to side, so the “RW” in the pattern, which means “reverse work” and generally means to flip it upside down, in this case means flip from left to right! Good thing someone informed me of that, because I would never have gotten it right otherwise!

I had a very hard time getting this pattern going. According to the pattern, there are four rings labeled A through D. A and C are exactly the same, and B and D are exactly the same also, so really, it’s only two rings, and you’re repeating the pattern until you reach the length you want. I had to rewrite the pattern to grasp it in my head, because when it said to attach a ring to ring A, it threw me off. Which ring A? Because as you’re repeating the pattern, every other ring is ring A. I know it seems stupid that I didn’t automatically assume it was the ring A that I had just completed, but I really couldn’t grasp the idea until I re-labeled the rings A through H and rewrote the pattern using those designations. In hindsight, now that I have the pattern working right, it’s not a difficult pattern at all and it’s very pretty, but because it was worked differently from everything I’ve tried up until now, I just couldn’t wrap my head around it.

This is a single-shuttle pattern. Now, everything I’ve done up until now has technically been a single-shuttle pattern, but has included a ball thread. Because I have so much trouble with working thread right off the ball, I’ve adopted working from two shuttles instead, with the second replacing the ball. This pattern really is single-shuttle!! There is no ball thread, only the one shuttle and whatever thread you’ve loaded it with. That’s another reason I had so much trouble; it was so not the way I had gotten used to working!!

I’ve also found a few Celtic tatting projects I’d like to try, which essentially means lots of chains made and woven into the work, so it’s actually Celtic knotwork. It looks beautiful, and it looks complicated as all get out, so I’m dying to try it, though I’m pretty sure I’m going to be frustrated sooner rather than later!

My gripfids for ply-split braiding came in yesterday too, along with some cord, and I can now see that when I make my own cord, it has to be a good bit tighter than I’ve been making it. I was also advised that when I do make my own cord, I need to put the aglets on each end while the cord is still under tension, and the end that is anchored should have all four cords on cup hooks in the same configuration as my cordmaker. The configuration can be more spread apart than the cordmaker, but not closer, so once I find a way to create an anchoring end, I’ll be giving that a try. As skeins go, the cord I bought is expensive, so it’ll be much more cost effective to make my own. I’m looking forward to trying it. It’s not rocket science, but there’s still more to doing it than I expected. When I say expensive, I’m speaking relativity. The skein is only $3.25, but it’s not very much cord when you look at the length. On the other hand, what I’ve been using, the perle cotton I already had in my stash from my cross-stitching days, is a little over $1 per skein, and you need four of them to make a cord. Of course, after you’ve unwound the skein in order to make the cord, lengthwise you get more out of it. It’s really a case of 6 on one hand, half a dozen on the other. In other words, I’d probably break even no matter which way I go on this. The biggest plus to making my own cord, though, is color selection. The online store I ordered the cord from has a selection of eleven colors. I’ve got to have more choice than that: enter the perle cotton!

So, since I’m up so early today (okay, I haven’t gone to bed yet. Or rather, I did, but couldn’t sleep), I’m going to work some more on Corn and Chaff until I finally get sleepy! If I’m lucky, it won’t be long!

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Complexity

More complex? But not loved.

So, as mentioned before, I’ve been looking for new, more complex patterns to try tatting. Part of the problem I’ve had so far is that I really do better if I not only have a diagrammed chart, but also the written out instructions, so I can bounce back and forth when I’m not sure I understand something. So far, I’ve only yet found one pattern on Pinterest that satisfied that criteria. It was an edging pattern that I don’t really like all that much by itself, but it had the written instructions and two charts, which was awesome, so I did it in a couple of repeats before deciding I really don’t like that particular pattern. I don’t know if it really counts as more complex…it’s still simple rings and chains, and simple joins, but it was more complex to me in that the configuration was different from the bookmark that I’ve done umpteen times now.

There is a pattern I really want to try very badly, and I can’t find it anywhere: Mary Konior’s Corn and Chaff pattern. It’s gorgeous, at least to me, and I’ve seen it pop up any number of times on Pinterest, but there’s just one problem. The only books that the pattern can be found in, while they can still be purchased on Amazon, are priced well into the realm of the ridiculous. Apparently the author passed away, so there will be no more books forthcoming, obviously, and I’m not either willing or able to pay $100+ for one book!!! I tend to think twice or three times when a book is $30, but there’s a far better chance that I will buy that book than there is when the book goes past that, which is my personal limit. Which kind of sucks for me, as the pattern itself has never yet popped up anywhere, and I don’t yet have enough experience to reverse engineer it from a photograph. So I keep eyeing it and sighing over it, and hoping that at some point, someone will put it online where I can see it!

I did have some fun with my allowance this month, so the shuttles are breeding again, and I ordered some Japanese cro-tatting hooks from Lacis. Not the expensive ones, which are about $60 for four hooks, but their own, much less expensive brand! And the gripfids and some cord for ply-split braiding. And I sent an email asking for help with making my own cord, since I am apparently doing something wrong when I try it myself. The Lacis cordmaker I have will do the job,  but I need to figure out how to do it correctly, which is the issue here. There are actually better cordmakers available, but the least expensive one is $119, and you still need a drill to operate it, which is easy enough to get, and get with your wallet pretty much unscathed–it doesn’t have to be a high end drill, after all–but it’s that initial outlay of money that isn’t an option right now!! This girl is on a budget, and probably always will be. Vet techs may be happy and love our careers, but we will never be rich. (Which actually causes a rant I may have posted before: doctors and nurses only have to learn one species of living being, where we have to learn all but that one. And in a general practice, we are the anesthetist, the X-ray tech, the lab tech, the janitor, the receptionist, and a zillion other things at once, and we don’t get paid anywhere near as much!!! Grrr…) But I digress. So I’m waiting to hear back about what I may be doing wrong. With all the yarn and floss in my stash, it’d be much more cost effective to make my own cords!!!

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