A Short Spring

This is the first 10 rounds of Renulek's wiosna 2018, Spring doily or Spring napkin. Renulek gives the stitch count for a round every week on her blog, or you can buy the whole pattern in her Etsy shop. Mine is tatted in Coats thread size 40.

When I was working on round 10, I realised that I had made a mistake in round 4, and as a result was one repeat short. The number of repeats doubles in round 11, which would compound the problem. Rather than correct the mistake or carry on regardless, I decided to invent a finishing round and leave it at that. It measures 37 cm across, not a bad size for a doily.

If anyone notices the mistake without being told, I'd say they haven't enough to do!

The Decision

Thanks very much to everyone who responded to yesterday's post. Turns out there are quite a few possible ways forward! After some contemplation, I finished tatting round 10. I don't like it as an outer row, I think the outward facing rings make it look incomplete. I had a look at the photo of the finished doily on Renulek's blog  and took a design element from round 12 or so to create an outer row. I've only just begun and it's possible it'll need a bit of tweaking, but I think it will work.

That Sinking Feeling

23 repeats? There shouldn't be 23 repeats. Yup, definitely 23 repeats. Now to find the mistake. Counting, counting, counting. And here it is, a ring missed on the fourth round:

What to do? Jack reckons I should carry on regardless, but looking at Renata's picture of the whole doily I don't think that will be possible, because the number of repeats keeps increasing as the doily gets bigger. I really don't feel like redoing all that. One possibility would be to leave the butterfly round as the outer round. Even with 23 butterflies instead of 24 I think it would look alright. Any other ideas welcome!

Half Way Round

I'm half way round Round 10, feeling like the white rabbit in Alice in Wonderland!

Holiday Snaps

We're back from our holiday. I have a lot of catching up on cleaning and tatting the Spring doily to do, so here are a few holiday snaps to look at until I get my act together!

We traveled 4000 kms on our journey. To make sense of our route, have a look at this map. We spent the first night in Gaborone in Botswana, then went to Bulawayo and Harare. We then drove back to Bulawayo and up to Victoria Falls. We had planned a round trip, travelling by ferry along Lake Kariba, but the ferry didn't sail, so we had to go by road. The Victoria Falls were really spectacular. I've seen them before, but not with so much water going over them. There were huge amounts of spray, drenching the onlookers:

One evening we took a boat ride on the Zambezi River above the Falls:

We also went for a game drive through the national park near the Falls; here are a couple of the animals we saw:

Back to the map: we went into Namibia and along the Caprivi Strip (above Chobe NP on the map) and then into Botswana and southwards along the edge of the Okavango Delta:

We bypassed Maun and took the southern route back, through the Kalahari. We spent a night at a place called Kalahari Rest and then left very early to get back to South Africa:

Vatlap

Some Afrikaans words are way more expressive than an English equivalent. Vatlap (fut-lup) translates as 'gripping cloth', which I think works better than hot pad or pot holder. Whatever you call them, I crocheted these over the weekend to give as a gift. I think I might make more while we are on holiday. We are leaving later today to spend two weeks in Zimbabwe. I won't be blogging until we get back. I'll have some catching up on blog reading to do then too.

Twin Hats

As with the blankets I made for the twins, which you can see in this post, I made their hats 'the same but different'. They can choose to wear matching blue hats, or turn them the other way and have hats with different patterns. Options are always good, I reckon.