Promised Picture

Here is the promised picture of Gary's shirt. Randy was taking this back to him. There are a lot of items here that we did at CWT. There are angels on both shoulders (which don't show up very well).
There are a number of hearts where we were playing with Mark Myers Dizzy Double Stitches. There are snails and mystery motifs. The button also holds some of Patti Duff's beaded bookmarks. Any number of SCMR style butterflies had flown in and attached themselves to the shirt. Jack Coen had even carved a Lady Hoare style shuttle and there's thread wound on it and a motif started for Gary to finish.
The green "mass" on the right shoulder (upper left on the picture) was our representation of Gary's bag ... and even sometimes what he does to some of our bags -if we leave them in sight and unprotected. LOL
You can also see a number of Randy's Bumble Bees. The cute little critters using two shuttles tatted in the alternate thread method and the wings are double stitches on picots.
While we did miss Gary, we did get to talk to him briefly on Saturday, the 21st of June. Randy did let us know that Gary is at home now and has been going through all the cards that had been sent. He has a very long road to recovery and would probably appreciate cards through the long months ahead.

A long plane ride back had me playing with techniques. The picture of the butterflies, while not the best quality, was an interesting experiment in double stitches. All have the same stitch count; larger wings are 6 - 6 - 6 - 6 and the smaller wings are 6 - 6 - 6. The one on the left uses standard double stitches (DS).
The one on the right uses the Dizzy Double Stitches (DDS) and the center uses Ruth Perry's Balanced Double stitches (BDS, also described as a sliding square knot). For DS and BDS, there is a very definite crown to each stitch upon completion.
When tatting in either of these two methods and tatting frontside / backside, it is quite easy to glance at the tatting to determine which have of the stitch should be done next. The DDS on the other hand is another story altogether; I also found the tension more difficult to control with the DDS. I want to try to get a paper together, along with better scans of the butterflies as well as some test rings I did. The test rings, like the butterfiles, all have the same stitch count but I hope to show more detail of the stitches on both the front and back sides.