muskaan's T*I*P*S: magic revealed

Thursday, 18 July 2019

magic revealed

Snowflake #5 in Land of Laces’ 25 Snowflake Project !

MatheMagical Star

click to download free pattern pdf

It’s a simple case of counting – in decreasing order, then in increasing order. This forms the 2 sides of an arm, tipped with a clover, and an additional ring at the base, between each arm. The base ring is of same size as the one with which the arm starts/ends. Clover has same sized side rings as the ones we end the count with, with a larger central ring.

All rings are bilaterally symmetrical, hence I remember them as a 9 ring or 5 ring, etc. instead of an 18 (9+9) or a 10 (5+5) ring.

Thus in the large 9to4 version, I go up an arm with

base 9,

arm up 9,8,7,6,5,4,

clover 4,7,4

arm down 4,5,6,7,8,9,

repeat.

Easy to keep track!

Each pair of sequential rings is separated by a chain. Each segment of chain (separated by a picot) has the same count as the ring adjacent to it.

Perhaps all this text has you confused. If so, simply click on the pdf and read/see for yourself, where I have shared counts for 4 versions, and you should get an idea of the possibilities and tweaks you can make yourself.

I must thank all the enthusiastic responses to my query – here and on facebook, including some valuable suggestions, which have hopefully been incorporated in the presentation with some success. However, if there is any difficulty, please don’t hesitate to ask. It wasn’t an easy presentation, sigh.

Keep all picots normal sized.
It is a pretty forgiving and versatile pattern and all versions lay flat.
While working the ring pairs, avoid gapsosis. This pattern provides good practice!
Fill up the main shuttle to capacity, since the large version consumes a lot of thread. I use Pony bobbin shuttles which are relatively smaller sized.
2 shuttles are required only if one is tatting the filled-in version. There are options one can use to still work with ball instead of 2^nd shuttle, but I prefer the 2^nd shuttle look.
Since the star joins back to the start, picot join to the right is required.

I’ve included instructions for all 4 of these versions – large (9 to 4), medium (7 to 4), & small (5 to 2) ; open- & filled centers. Yet there is so much one can play around with!