Motif 7: Clever onion rings

Today's motif is a little onion ring butterfly from Tatted Butterflies by Adelheid Dangela.  I haven't done a lot of onion rings, so I googled and found some lovely tutorials from Jane Eborall and Georgia Seitz.  The onion rings are worked as concentric rings, with a single shuttle.  I thought, "Oh, that's clever.  Let's try it!".

It turns out I was being too clever.  My onion rings didn't look like the picture.  The stitch count was off and the rings wouldn't lie flat.

The pattern clearly states "Work using 2 shuttles".  Onion rings with two shuttles are done by working the center round as a normal ring and the outside rounds as a series of chains.

Here's the final butterfly, with two shuttle onion rings.  I think it looks better.  It certainly lies flatter.  So, perhaps the moral of the story is: It's more important to read the instructions than to use clever techniques :)