Mistakes Are Not the End of the World!

It's true.  I was working on the 4th Round of Renulek, and I made a boo boo.  Can you pick it out?

After correction

Mistake above

I didn't hook the petals of my flowers together, making the elements separate from each other.  Boo!

I make mistakes all the time, and what I typically do is un-tat or retro tat, as so many people call it.  But here I had two rings to open, which isn't the easiest task though I can do it just fine, AND I had already retrotatted with this same section of thread once.  

One drawback of the Perle Cotton is that it "wears out" from retro tatting, getting fatigued, much more easily than cordonnet does.  I have just loved working with the Perle Cotton after doing several pieces in size 10 cordonnet, which was just eating my hands up.  

So, what do you do?  Well, one absolutely cool thing about tatting is that it is ALL KNOTS.  This means you can cut sections out without the entire piece falling apart.  But where do you cut?

 Rule One:  Don't cut the chain stitches.  Make your cut in the rings.  The small ring, I don't care where I cut, as it is the second piece in the flower element. I don't need that piece of thread.  I need to save the first part of the thread to weave into the corrected element.

The larger ring traveled along the bottom first and then up to the top where the tiny ring attaches.  So I am cutting at the LAST part of the ring just before it closed so as to save the most thread.
Here's the ring after I pulled out the teeny bits of wasted thread.  What do you do with that curlicue of thread?  Get it wet, stretch it out, and wait for it to dry.  A bit of a wait, but worth it.  Now you are ready to splice some thread together and fix the doily.  Get tatting again!