An impending August birthday provided the impetus for me to revisit Tea is for Tatting by Martha Ess.  The tiny square teapot, in Lisbeth 20:

This seemed a good opportunity to use a single shuttle joined split ring to climb out of the first clover round.   T’ain’t perfect, but it served the purpose well.  I also added two Catherine wheel joins to the chain that forms the lid, so as to avoid the color blip of a lock join.  (I must confess to having become a total junkie for all mock double stitch applications – simply cannot get enough of them!)

The smart person would have kept it simple and tatted a padded tail of some kind.  Instead, I used a strip from Bobbie Demmer’s Vintage Bag Pattern to form the body of the bookmark.

Long story short, what should have been an evening’s  tat, took a number of days; and then I very nearly mangled the whole thing when I had a magic thread disaster at the end.  I’ll spare you a photo of my poor blackened thumbnail, which got bent right back when the thread end that was stuck suddenly slid through.  Ouch!  Who knew that magic thread could be hazardous to one’s hands?  It would appear that, even in tatting: ‘power is nothing without control’.