Rant about tatting....

...for no particular reason. Fox mentioned the other day that she wasn't doing the Catherine Wheel join correctly and it got me to thinking. I am mostly self taught and until I went to a tatting workshop, I had never seen another tatter, or another tatter's work. I learned tatting, like I learned to knit crochet and embroider. I was shown the first steps and then just ran with it. If a pattern said to do something I didn't know, I did whatever worked for me. So I don't get bent out of shape by people talking about doing what is "right" or "proper". In short, I don't worry about tatting police. I see so few tatters, it isn't likely to matter and when I do they mostly are impressed by what I have done.

I am personally not impressed by bazaar junk done by a half blind granny using rope like thread and beads designed for use by a 5 year old. My apologies to elderly, visually challenged femmes assisting in raising funds for worthy causes, it's just a personal preference. I like to think that when something leaves my hands it can stand up to the close scrutiny of the average person. Good enough, is not good enough for me, I expect excellence from myself.

That said, over the years I have heard numerous things about the "right" way to tat and I have to admit that I mostly ignore it. Things like front side back side tatting. I personally don't think that it looks better, it just looks a little different. I don't do it and I make no apology. I do a lot of 3D tatting. When you look at a tulip, which is the front? The inside, or the outside? I like knowing that when I pull a doily out of the wash and slap it down on the table, which ever way it lands is right side up. In designing this necklace I wanted a sort of netting effect where the motifs join the necklace band so I used just chains over that section. Which meant when I got to the end of the row I just finished it with a split chain and turned around to do the next row. The recipient will never know or care that I didn't do front/back tatting.

I like balance. When I do a join, a join is a join, not a stitch. It seems to me, that in a design where a ring has a lot of joins, that counting the join as the first half of the stitch means that I'm losing a half stitch for every join which will make the ring smaller than a ring of the same stitch count that doesn't have joins. I don't count the join as a stitch, I've been doing it that way for over 30 years and so far it's worked.

Tiny invisible joining picots. Baloney! Imagine a mat full of lacy motifs all connected together. Envision delicate picots evenly spaced around the edges of each motif so that the lace is suspended in a diaphanous spiderweb of picots. Now picture the same thing where each motif is jammed up against the next one because of tiny joining picots. In my opinion it's UGLY. I don't do it.

Years ago when I was tatting the flowers for my wedding I needed to tat a lot of carnations in a short amount of time. I was literally -tatting in my sleep. The pattern had a very short split chain at the end of each row. Due to tatting late at night I often skipped the split chain, just finishing the row and then doing a slip stitch back to the last picot. In the ruffles of the carnations it wasn't visible and I was waaay too tired to be picky. I wouldn't have done it in a place where it would show and I wouldn't have done it if I'd had more time and hadn't been tired. Can you see them?

There are a lot of little things the tatting police probably wouldn't like about my tatting. That's OK. I don't tat for them, I tat for me. I tat because I enjoy tatting and I enjoy the fruits of my labour.

Just because the general consensus is that you ought to do things a certain way, doesn't mean that there might not be another equally effective way to do things. You can't always assume that because you do things differently, that you are doing it incorrectly. Who says you have to do things one way and one way only? You might be the person who finds a whole new BETTER way of doing things.

In case anyone is interested, here's a closeup of the assembled motifs and the little inset that I used to finish it off. I would have taken better pictures but it was late and it's already been packaged up and mailed off.