Knotted Up With Schwenke 'Tsuris'

tsuris - (Yiddish) aggravating trouble; "the frustrating tsuris he subjected himself to"

difficulty, trouble - an effort that is inconvenient; "I went to a lot of trouble"; "he won without any trouble"; "had difficulty walking"; "finished the test only with great difficulty" Oh Yah!

Susanne Schwenke's Design

Pretty but what a challenge! My goal was just to finish it.

The thread is vintage Coats #30; Kelly gave me a two balls of it this past summer.  It  broke twice, but I was pulling worked-over thread. It is great to work with, as it is a 6-cord cordonnet, crisp, firm and easy to tat. No twists or separations.  Very different from my experience with Lizbeth.

I followed all my self-help tatting hints, used the coloured diagrams,

(My camera is so good that I had great difficulty in blurring the photo!)

did not work too late into the wee hours and I still had to un-tat and CUT OUT A LOT!  Whew. I do not think I will be tatting this one again anytime soon.  But, it is pretty.  : )

There were lots of the BAD kind of knots in this tat. Now, I think about knots a lot, and on my daily route realized that I stroll past this one every single day.  It confronts me beside the sidewalk near my apartment, just hanging around, secured over the bough of a sturdy tree:

Then, I remembered a walk I took in New York a year ago, when I spotted this in a window in Soho. It was one of a few old prints showing sailing knots, (notice, it is a ds!) displayed in a very grimy window.

I mean really, who notices these things?  

Tatters!