25 Motif Challenge Guidelines

Here are some guidelines for the 25 Motif Challenge. Some people want to tat 25 new designs and some just want to tat 25 motives. So here's your sign-up page and your instructions.
You need a blog, photo album or web page to show off your work. So that we can all see how you are progressing send an e-mail to this site or just add the information to the comments. Your link will be added to those shown on this blog and then other people can add the link to their blogs as well.

On your blog state how you are approaching the challenge.
For example you might say:

- I'm going to design 5 hearts, 5 snowflakes, 5 butterflies, 5 crosses and 5 pairs of earrings.

Or you might say:

-I'm going to tat 25 motives from a published pattern by M. Riego and join them together to make a mat.

You decide what you'd like to do and we'll cheer you on as you meet you goal.

People have busy lives so this challenge will go on for the next calendar year. If you can meet your challenge in one month, that's terrific and we'll applaud your progress. We may even encourage you to do it all over again and try for something even more challenging! If you work full time, have family obligations that take a lot of you leisure time and manage after 1 year to only get half way to your goal, we'll applaud your attempt and encourage you to continue on.

What to show on your blog.
Pictures let us see how you are doing so we want to see how you're coming along. Some of your pictures may be of perfect, lovely creations, some of them may be of things that you tried, that didn't work out. Ask any designer and they'll tell you they learn more from their failures than they do from their successes. A project that doesn't work out shows you how NOT to do something. Their might be only one workable way to do the project you are tatting you might have discovered 1 of 5 ways it doesn't work. Congratulations, you have only 4 more possible mistakes before you find the one that does work.

If you want to share the pattern for your creations you are welcome to do so, the tatting community will be all the richer for it. Make sure that your copyright information is properly shown on each pattern. However, you are not obligated to show that pattern so you can use your own discretion. After we have completed the challenge we may collectively choose to publish what we have created, or some of us may discover that we have a real flair for designing and choose to put our designs in print. There are many possibilities, but we have a whole year to think about that and discuss it.

What not to show on your blog.
You can show things that you have tatted from a published pattern and you can modify a published pattern and show us what you have done and how you have modified it to produce your tatted work. You may NOT show a published pattern although you can provide a link to the author's original work if there is one. There is a difference between the lace you tat from a pattern and the pattern itself. If the pattern isn't yours don't show it unless you have the author's permission.

You can freely use public domain patterns as a jumping off point for creating new patterns. Often the best way to learn is to start with someone else's design and make a change to it. Public domain patterns are great for that purpose and can give you a framework to work from.

Being a designer
When you begin creating your own designs you are often so excited to share them with other people, and to feel the gratification of knowing that other people like your work, that you don't think about protecting your intellectual property. Would you buy a book that has 25 designs in it? Most tatters would. One lone motif design wouldn't make a book, but a year from now you may have 25 new creations all your own. Having produced that much original lace will change your thinking. You will have sweated and agonized over some of it and other pieces will have just flowed from your fingers. A year from now you may be ready to publish a book.

So, whether you think you are the next M. Riego or not, when you have created a new piece, write it out. Write down how you got from start to finish, in a way that other people can also tat your designs. In other words, treat it as if you were going to publish the design even if you don't. If you don't ever publish, that's OK, but at least there will be a written record of what you did. Write out your pattern as soon after you have completed it as you can. What you can do from memory today, you will have to reproduce by counting stitches a month from now. If you DO decide to publish you won't want to have to go back a year from now and count stitches on 25 pieces so that you can get your book printed.

Whatever you do, have fun and we'll all enjoy the process together.

NOTE: From time to time the it's nice to showcase what people have been working on. To protect copyrighted work, Blogger will not allow just linking to the image in your blog/web page/photo album so it is necessary to copy the image to post it here. Some people have scanned several motives together and in order to show only one motif, the picture needs to be cropped. To make things simpler it will be assumed that you DO want to show off what you are working on. If you don't want your images to be shown here, please write and advise me not to show it. This isn't an attempt to take anything from anyone or change anything belonging to anyone, it just makes it simpler to add pictures here so that people just popping in, can get a taste of what you are doing and hopefully they will take the time to visit your blog and see all of your creations.