Giant picot overkill?

I love picots.  Big picots.  Giant picots!

But I think I finally overdid it with this tatted motif.  The huge picots detract from the design and it just looks a bit messy.

Lyn Morton would be horrified to see what I did to her beautiful pattern!  🙂

I made several mistakes, missed a couple of joins, and experienced two disasters while tatting it.  The “Tips and Tricks” in Mary Konior’s Visual Patterns book came to my rescue.  (If you are a new tatter, her “Tips and Tricks” alone are worth the price of the book.)

Using her instructions, I was able to open a ring easily and untat my mistakes as simply as untatting a chain.  And I used her weaver’s knot to rescue a broken thread that only had about 1/3″ tail remaining.

So it was a learning experience on several levels…. one of which is be careful when you change the length of the chains in the center because it definitely impacts how the rest of the pattern fits together!