Motif No. 44

I finished this motif earlier in the week, but didn't get around to sewing in the ends until yesterday.  I then waited another day before scanning it.

The motif shown above is motif No. 44 in the second round of the 25 motif challenge (round 2).  It is swirl snowflake from Tatted Snowflakes by Vida Sunderman made with Kreinik braid no. 4 (very fine).

Surprisingly, I had quite a few difficulties with this thread, which is I think a first for the Kreinik braid.  It tended to split so I had to be very careful when pulling thread through in sewings.  You can also see a huge mess of a knot off the center ring on the right hand side.  I had started to sew the chain to the wrong picots and didn't notice until I was about 4 or 5 sewings into it.  Now if I had been working with normal thread, undoing what I had completed would not have been a problem, but the metallic thread was not cooperating.  I ended up having to cut the working thread where I first made the mistake and continue from there.  Unfortunately I was not sure that I would have enough thread to start over, so I continued despite the knot.  I think I also made a few mistakes in the last repeat, but they don't jump out like the knot, so I am not too concerned about them.  It's a shame this thread was so hard to work with - the color is pretty!

Overall (excluding the knot!) this is an interesting pattern.  It reminds me of one of Mary Konior's patterns - windmill, I think.  I never made it so I may be way off.

The final snowflake is ~ 1.5 inches in diameter.