Broken butterfly wing

A few days ago, Muskaan (who is an awesome tatter whom I have learned a lot from) created a little butterfly pattern and asked us to decorate it however we wanted to.

I tried a couple of ideas, including Victorian sets and adjusting the stitch counts, but I had a lot of bad starts and eventually gave up.

I promised her I would try again and on my latest outing to the forest, I decided to use up a shuttle full of silk thread. I added some blue seed beads and only a couple of extra stitches in the chains to balance out the beads in the rings.

It was going very well and I was at the last ring when I realised the wings were not symmetric. I checked the pattern again and, sure enough, I had taken a wrong turn after the first ring, so instead of the top rings facing away from each other, they both faced the same way. I didn't take any pictures but I think you can imagine it.

I blame it all on my lack of skill with applied spacial perception (I also get lost easily in places I have been before, but coming from a different road). I was following the diagram but the upside down image played tricks on my eyes.

I was ready to cut it up, recover my beads and make another try. I laughed about my lapse in concentration with my husband and a friend and showed them the crooked butterfly. When I told them I was going to perform major surgery and recover the pieces of my Frankenstein monster, our friend said he would like to try to fix it. He would just need needle, thread and a pair of scissors. I told him it would come apart if he tried to cut the join, but he insisted that I would have nothing to lose so I gave him the tools.

He cut the join, then split the thread in 6 and connected the two rings in the correct place with a 6th of the thread. I guess my tatting was tight enough to withstand the cut and maybe the beads helped too, but it stayed together.

You can see the broken thread in the top left ring.

I will keep it and try to hold it together with glue and will probably use it as a decoration. I will most definitely make another butterfly, but will learn from my mistakes and do it properly this time. I also encourage you to try the pattern out and bring your own artistic touch to the butterfly.