No Tatting Today

I haven't been able to tat for days. Friday we had a minor mishap in the bathroom which resulted in doing some major repairs. It took 2 days to put everything back in order. Did you know paint has an expiration date? I didn't. Last year I pulled out a gallon of white paint to touch up some bits in the bathroom. The paint went on funny with occasional lumps in it, but I didn't care as long as it covered over the repair bits. The problem came later. It stunk. For weeks it stunk. I was embarrassed having people visit it smelled so bad. Not just the bathroom, the. whole. house. I knew that fixing it was going to mean sanding all of the old paint off. I just didn't want to do it.

You're probably wondering why I just didn't get my wonderful hubby to do it. Any other job he would have done it a minute, but paint fumes do him in. Closed in a room with chemical smells will put him down and out for days. So we have an understanding, if it involves smelly stuff, it's my job. He removed everything removable. The last time we did the bathroom that included the toilet. (Dude, in a one bathroom house I need that! We are NOT removing the toilet this time.)

So, after several hours with my hands in various strong chemicals which caused my hands to swell, I sanded, washed and painted every surface in the bathroom including the cabinetry. Two coats. The pale yellow is gone and now everything is pristine white. Some new outlet and light switch covers and everything will be fresh and sparkling.

The tatting, by the way, is a test piece done last week. The project has been restarted 3 times and cut off. As soon as the swelling and muscle ache dies down I'll give it another try.

Tatting, what else?

Here's a picture of the shamrock bookmark I did for the newsletter. It isn't anything really special, but certainly appropriate for anyone you know who's Irish. It could be longer, but I started off thinking 5 repeats would be about right and only loaded that amount of thread onto my shuttle. About the time I thought it could do with being longer, I ran out of thread and just quit. I think it's kind of cute, others may disagree, but they're welcome to just move along and read another blog with something they do like

I've been doing a lot of tatting, but nothing to show yet. I'm working on a beaded design and for the zillionth time missed my lost crochet hook. I bought a #14 (.6mm) hook for doing bead joins. That sucker had such a sharp point it went through anything I stored it in, jeans, purse, sewing kit, you name it. I suspect that poking a hole through whatever I was carrying it in was how I lost it. Trying to find a replacement was a challenge as most stores only carry common sizes. You'll never guess where I found one, it was in the local dollar store, which means I not only found one, it was cheap to boot. (Note to self get back to the store and get another one before they're all gone.

Now that I have another teeny tiny hook I can get back to my beaded design and I don't mind that I need to start all over again because I have a hook now!

Circles and Squares

While surfing the other day I saw picture of a corner of a crocheted bit that had a fairly solid circular motif with lacier bits making square corners and I thought of doing something like it in tatting. I got the circle part done and stared on the lacy part, but it didn't work so I un-did an entire row. I liked the rings in the corner and added a row to join them all together. I'm not sure if I want to add another row of chain or just stop here. I made a mistake I'll have to correct, but it's at the beginning of the prvious row. I'll either have to cut off 2 rows or cut out part of the previous row. Or not, I'm not planning on doing anything with it, I was just playing around.

Hearts

One of the designs I created for the February newsletter were these simple earrings. Hearts are always appropriate and never more so than for Valentines day. I don't play with beads a lot and I've never designed something the used beads on the core thread. So I sat down one day and whipped up this little design. I really like the way that the beads on the core thread forced a nice even outline. As heart designs go, this is about as simple as you can get so it isn't surprising that there are several on the internet that are very similar.

Shawl anyone?

I woke up this morning thinking that the design I created for the V-neck would make a nice triangular shawl. Not attached to fabric as I had been thinking, but all by itself. I had to do a quick drawing to see how it would look. It might need a little something in between motives or maybe small rings thrown off the tops of the chains at that point so that four of them would join in the middle. It might make for a more solid fabric. Hmmm. Do I want to take on a big project. I used size 30 and got a motif that's 3 inches across. I figure about 50 inches across the long side or roughly 18 motives. That's enough calculating. It'd be like making a bedspread and I don't have enough spare time to launch into anything that big. It would be pretty though.

Yippee the Newsletter's out!

The February newsletter is finally out. I know it's March, but I almost made it for February, in spite of spending part of each day this last month soaking up water from soggy carpets and consequently doing a ton of laundry. I 'm getting closer to my target date with each issue so I'm a happy camper.

Remember that mess I showed you earlier, where my left side didn't match my right side and I had to cut it out several times to get it right?

Take a look at it now.

I not only designed a motif for the challenge, I tatted 9 of them, added a border and attached it to a T-shirt. Here's a shirt with some WOW factor.

Here's a close up of the motif. I knew it was going to be added to a garment and I didn't want to spend ages blocking it every time it was washed, so there are very few free picots. In fact there are just a few in strategic places so that the motives can be tacked down so they stay in place during laundering.

Designing the motif was the easy part, matching the border to it filling in the gaps between the points of the motives and making a wide enough straight edge to it that it covers up the band around the neck V was a bit more of a challenge. Which is why I had a lot of messes before I had something useful.

I am pleased with the way it turned out, especially since the border fits around the V-neck but it is actually a 90 degree turn so that it could be added to the edge of a hanky, used as a border on a shawl, mat, tablecloth or whatever you have that needs a square corner. I used a Coats thread size 30 for this one but you could use any size thread you want and just add or subtract motives to lengthen or shorten the border to fit the fabric.

Splish, Splash

Drip, drip, drip. It's the sound of snow melting in the sunshine, but why is it coming from the computer desk? And why is there that splashing sound coming from the bedroom? I'll tell you why, it's another ice dam on the roof.

Third time this year we have water leaking in, as the water from the melting snow expands as it freezes and gets forced up, the roof and under the shingles, then melts again and seeps down through every crevice it can find. Dripping water in the closet with all my tatting supplies, fortunately they're in a large plastic tub. Seeping water coming off the garage roof is once again soaking into the bedroom carpet and our latest incursion is leaking around the windows in the computer room and down onto the desk/scanner/printer/power supply battery back up and in the spare room dripping down onto the bed soaking the mattress.

If you've been wondering why there's been no blog lately, it's because I've been busy trying to dry everything out.

Just to show you what I've been up to when I haven't been doing laundry and mopping floors. Here's one of the items in the next newsletter, a hyacinth, just in time for spring.

Happy Valentines Day

Since it's Valentine's day I thought I'd post some earrings I designed ages ago. They're quick to do and make an easy little gift.
Enjoy!
Edited to add:
Experienced tatters will find the diagram above sufficient to tat these earrings, but for newer tatters here are some more specific instructions. In size 20 thread you will need about a yard of thread for each earring. You need 2 shuttles. Load 21 beads and the earring hook* onto the thread. Wind each shuttle leaving all the beads in the middle between them. Divide off six beads to be used in the rings and leave all the others for the chains and the outward ring at the bottom.

Begin the first ring with all 6 beads in the ring. You could use only 5 beads, but the earring hook will sit better lying between 2 beads than it does on top of 1. Tat 6 stitches and slide all 6 beads and the hook into the picot. Leave a little extra thread in the picot for all the joins, tat the last 6 stitches and close. RW. Tat the chain sliding a bead into each picot as shown on the diagram. RW.

When you tat the next ring join into the beady picot leaving one bead between the first and second ring. Finish the ring. RW. Tat the next chain sliding beads into place. RW.

Tat the next ring joining into the beady picot, just like the last ring leaving one bead between rings. RW.

With the second shuttle, slide one bead into the ring and tat the outward ring at the bottom of the heart sliding the bead into place on the picot. Finish the ring and switch shuttles to tat the chain.

Continue around the heart leaving 2 beads and the hook in the join between the first and fifth rings.

* Some earring hooks have a closed hole at the end and it's necessary to start with the hook in place before you begin. Some have a little gap that you can slide the thread under after the earring is completed. With a closed hole you have the hook in the way as you tat, but the hook isn't going to fall off when the earring is finished. With an open gap, to slide the thread under, it's easier to tat the earring and add the hook later, but the thread that can slide under the gap can also slide out and the hook can fall off the earring.

Just One Pattern

The subject of copyright has come up on the tatting lists again. It's a tough problem because it can get boring for people who have heard it all before, but it's important for everyone to hear it at least once. I have only published one book and it was a major headache. The book had a lot of patterns in it, but the most interesting ones were the life size flowers. You can't really do a book of flowers and not use colour. Colour printing increases the cost of publishing.

At the risk of giving you a long ramble about my publishing efforts, here are some of the things I ran into. I began by thinking of the types of flowers that would be suitable for things like wedding bouquets and then I planned out how to tat them. The most complex flower I did was a cattleya orchid. I began by going through all of my gardening books and looking at the structure of the flower, then I searched the internet for a picture of the kind of flower I wanted to tat. This one here.

I did one of the base petals, but didn't like the shaping so I scrapped it and tried again. The second variation was closer to what I wanted. I tatted the base part and then scanned the lace. Then I drew on top of the scanned picture so that I would have a template of the rings and chains I used for proportions.

Next I took my drawing of the base and laid it over top of the flower picture I found on the internet and re-sized the picture so that the corresponding base petals of the picture were the same size as my drawing. Then I drew the outline of the side petals and sketched in some rings. The drawing was flat and the flower needed to be 3 dimensional so I did some adjusting of the ring sizes to shape the petal and tatted a rough version of the right petal. It wasn't quite right but it showed me where I needed to adjust my count. Then I needed to repeat everything for the left petal. I couldn't just tat 2 petals the same as the petal had definite top and bottom connecting points. When it came to drawing the second side petal I had to do it as a complete reverse of the first side.

Then I had to create the labellum, the middle bottom petal, which had a whole different shape. This was not only a mind boggling piece to tat, it was equally difficult to draw. Once I had the pattern drawn I went back and counted the stitches on the flower I had tatted and put the numbers on the pattern. The numbers didn't fit in. Some places there were 3 numbers in the same place where ring joined to ring with chains connecting both. Creating clear drawings for three dimensional objects is very challenging. You need to be able to show where each part connects to the next part on 3 different planes. Once I had everything in place I tatted the flower again working only from the diagram. Then I sent the drawings out to a couple of accomplished tatters so they could give it a try and give me their comments and I adjusted the pattern again to make it easier.

This was a very complex pattern, but you can see some of the necessary steps up to this point. I had invested about 4 months of time going from idea to drawn pattern. Think it was ready? Guess again. Now I had to bring the drawing into the publishing software and lay it out so that it would be easy to follow. My first obstacle was getting everything to fit on the pages. The base when it was large enough so that the stitch count could be read, didn't fit on the page. I could crop part of the pattern but that didn't look right and it left a lot of empty background space. So I re-drew one segment with enough information on where the other two fit.

Then I had the two side petals one had to be worked clockwise and the other had to be worked counterclockwise and the whole petal diagram was too big to fit on a single page. I ended up breaking it down into individual rows. I grayed out the previous row to make the working row stand out a little in the diagram. Of course breaking it into individual rows meant a certain amount of re-drawing.

The bottom petal curled around and joined to itself which was difficult to explain on a flat diagram and it also required several re-draws because the final version wouldn't fit on a single page without being shrunk and then the numbers were unreadable so a lot of things had to be shifted around. Then to make things clearer, taking into consideration the input from my test tatters I went back and added in some markers on the diagram. I included some text at key points to explain what needed to be done. Finally, so that the picture might more easily convey the different petals, I re-tatted it in 3 colours to show the base, side and bottom petals.

Occasionally a publication will show the steps of a pattern with each piece done by itself. That wasn't something I had to do, but if an author knows that will be required ahead of time she can take a picture of it as it develops. If not, then it means tatting each piece separately. Think of a cooking show where you watch the dish being prepared and popped into the oven and as the freshly made one goes in a finished one is pulled out. It means that the dish has been prepared 2 or 3 times so that you can see it at each step.

Think that's the end of it? Not yet. Once I had the drawings and the text to go with it... Did I mention text? Even when I use visual diagrams, they are often improved by text that gives additional explanation especially with a complex pattern. This is very true with three dimensional work like flowers. Thinking of what to say making sure what I am saying is clear and can't be misconstrued, avoiding repeating myself, these were just a few of the challenges.

Then what are drawings and text without pictures. The lace had to be photographed. Flat things fit on a scanner so it's easy to get a digital image, but flowers or pin cushions need a camera. Even if it is flat, I wanted a group picture of the laces in the publication for the front cover at least. Ideally, I wanted a group picture for the front cover and individual pictures to go with each pattern. Anyway, you get the idea.

Sometimes you want props to go with the lace. A doily on a table is nice but a little porcelain figure on it is more attractive. Depending on the colour of the lace, you may want to try several different tables to see which makes the most attractive background. A dark thread will look nicer on a light colour wood, and a multi colour doily needs a neutral background, all of these are considerations and you may have to take dozens of pictures to get what you really like. If you take a picture of a flower do you take the picture from the front or the side. Maybe the picture from the front looks prettier, but the one from the side gives the tatter a better idea of the flower's construction. One picture of front and side is better, but that means tatting a second flower.

Of course this is only one pattern. Since a publication has several patterns you also have to remember that they all need to fit in. If you have a picture, a drawing and text they all have to be fit in on adjacent pages. Sometimes the end of one pattern will leave half a page of space That means that you occasionally have to break a pattern into smaller pieces so that all of the pieces will fit together in the allowable space, and sometimes that means re-drawing a pattern.

Maybe a picture of the finished piece taken from several angles would be better, but what if you have already fit everything in nicely and there isn't any room for those extra pictures? Do you add the pictures and shift everything else around to fill up the extra space, or leave the picture out.

That brings us back to the cost of printing. You could run things off on your home printer. Before the advent of colour home laser printers this wasn't a viable option, but things have changed. Commercial printing involves a lot of money. Businesses don't like to set their equipment up for small jobs. Commercial equipment will pump out lots of copies with good quality output, but it takes a long time to set them up and you pay for that. So for a small volume you pay a large amount of money. If you do a lot more copies you still pay for the initial set up cost, but after that you're only paying for paper, ink and the amount of time the equipment is running.

As tatters we know that we aren't going to sell millions of copies, but we might sell a few thousand. So we fit into not quite personal printing and not quite commercial printing. We need to make enough copies to satisfy the demand, but we don't really want to store thousands of copies. We want to keep the price of our books low so that people will buy them and that means cutting some things out to reduce costs. Colour images are lovely, but they cost so colour is one of the first things to get cut. Extra pages over the bare essentials cost too, so they go. Then comes the editing to see if everything the author wants included really has to be there. Maybe a design has to be redrawn to pare down the number of pages needed or maybe several items can be photographed together to cut down on the number of colour pages used.

Finally the publication has been tweaked as much as it can be tweaked and it's ready for the printer. The money is spent for the required volume of books and the work is ready for sale. You hope that people will like your designs, you hope that you earn at least a little bit of money for all your blood, sweat and tears. You hope that you can recoup what it cost to produce all of those copies and you also hope that you don't browse through the internet one day and find your design being sold under somebody else's name.

Is copyright an issue? Probably not, for those who don't publish their patterns. Or for those who don't design their own laces. Or for those without a conscience.

By the way, the lovely purple orchid pictured here was tatted by Sue Hanson. In spite of her assertions that she doesn't "do big" she struggled through this pattern and sent me her flower so that I could photograph it for the book.

Authors, especially authors of tatting books don't make a lot of money from their publications, and most of us do it because we love tatting, and creating new designs. When we see things that were created out of our own imaginations stolen out from under us, we get a little cranky. A comment about copying patterns was made on one of the tatting lists.

"As long as we are not making a big profit and just sharing, then go ahead and SUE US !! "

When you see what an author has to go through to create a publication, is it any wonder that we see red when such comments are made? It's like saying to us that you have no regard for our effort, that you don't care about what it cost us to produce those designs for you. You know that we don't make enough money from our designs to be able to afford the cost of taking you to court so you can abuse us and it won't matter.

But it will matter. It will matter when all of the designers look at the abuse and decide that it isn't worth the effort. When the designers do with their books, what they did recently with their web sites and just close things down. No new patterns, no tatting innovations, just some century old designs. Think of all the new things being created and shared. Then imagine all of it gone because people were greedy. So it's just one pattern you copy out of a friend's book. That's one book less that the author was able to sell. Now multiply that by all of the other people who copy "just one pattern". Is a tatting author going to be able to reduce their printing costs? Not while people copy "just one pattern".

Tatting that didn't make it.

If you went by how often I post about what I'm tatting, you'd get the impression that I don't tat very much. Nothing could be further from the truth. I tat a lot, just nothing that I can post most of the time. Every quarter I work on the designs that will go into the next newsletter. Like this one on the left. It isn't quite right.

Neither is this one. It's too big and the shaping isn't what I need.

This one is getting closer to the right shape but it's still too big.





This one is getting there but it has empty spaces where I want it solid and the edges aren't pointy enough. When I get it right I'll have to tat a whole bunch of them. Just what I like -tatting a whole bunch of the same thing over and over again. NOT.



See - lots of little tatted bits but nothing really worth showing. These little mis-shapen bits will eventually work up into something worth while, they just don't look like it at this stage. It would be nice to post my progress on things more often, but since almost everything I create ends up in the newsletter I can't really show you what I've done until after the fact. I suppose I could start a whole bunch of drafts and publish them one at a time after the newsletter is sent out. Talk about anti-climax.

Where did I go wrong? Answer: Everywhere.

See this mess? It's enough to make you throw your shuttles across the room. Of course after you've screamed a little in frustration you have to go collect the shuttles and start fixing. Since we were talking about designing previously. I thought you'd like to see what an elegant piece of tatting looks like in process.


This picture shows both the left and the right side of a multi motif project that I've been working on. Since this will be one of those designs that's going into the newsletter I don't want to show it all right now as it will spoil the surprise. Both sides are supposed to be the same and as you can see they're not. See all those threads hanging off? They're the bits where I started over again several times.

The motif is a standard snowflake shape with 6 points. To make it into the ---- project it needs to have a straight side. When you join six pointed snowflake shapes together you have big gaps in the dip between points. While maintaining the design elements of the motif I need to fill in the gap and build the whole thing up to a straight edge. Then I need to make a somewhat solid band along the straight edge.

I worked one side the way I thought it would look good, remembering to add picots at strategic points, outward facing rings, where I needed them and got into the second pattern repeat of the first row. That's where I decided to do something different, that I thought would look better. It did, so I just carried on. I knew I'd have to fix the first bit before I did the next row but, hey that's the way it goes when you're designing on the fly.


When I got to the other end I had to invent a different arrangement for the edge of row one. I liked the second variation better so all I had to do was cut off the beginning of row one and make it the same. No problem I'd just fix that part when I got row 2 done. Six split rings into row 2 I realized that the long chain I had begun the row with wasn't going to work right.


AGAIN, I changed what I was doing and here I am at the point of tatting row 2 into row 1 in places where this part of row 1 doesn't have places. I've already cut off part of row 1 on the left and this is where I need to retro tat a split ring or 2, some chain and a couple of regular rings.

Fortunately the end on the right I only have to cut out the chain and replace it with 2 rings and 2 chains. Except that, as this is where row 1 turns and becomes row 2 I kind of think I'd like to replace the whole section, just so there aren't a bzillion ends all hidden in that one chain. Chains are easy to retro tat, but they're harder to hide ends in. Not normal ends, you understand, but the 40,000 ends you have when you need to cut out multiple bits because you were just winging it as you designed and it didn't quite work.

Stay tuned for the fixed version.

How to Tat

I have how to tat demos on my web site which were done when the internet was new and it was important for files to be small. There have been other videos done since, but I don't think any of them have been filmed from the tatter's point of view.

I frequently receive e-mail from people asking for help and often the problem is that they haven't wrapped the thread around their hand properly. Having written the same thing a bunch of times, I now keep a spare How to Tat draft e-mail. So for your pleasure and benefit, here are detailed instructions that should really de-mystify the process.

HOW TO TAT
There are several different methods of shuttle tatting, some of which are, the Riego method, the loop method and the traditional method. Each of these methods uses different motions to create the doublestitch that is used in all tatting. That can make it very confusing to a novice using more than one set ofreference material. The following instructions arefor the traditional method.

Double stitches (DS) are used to form rings (R)and chains (CH) and it is easiest to learn how to form the double stitches when working with 2 contrasting colours of size 10 thread. For example; red and white. Fill a shuttle with white thread, then knot the end of the white thread together with the ball of red thread.

Pinch the knot between the thumb and forefinger of the left hand. Take the red thread up and over the back of the fingers of the left hand, spreading the fingers a little, then secure the thread by wrapping it several times around the left baby finger. All of the action happens on the stretch of thread between the forefinger and middle finger of the left hand. So make sure there is enough room for the shuttle to pass between those 2 fingers. Let's call this part ofthe red thread the "action" thread.

Now take the shuttle in the right hand and with the hook, point or pick pointing forward, place the thumb on the bottom and the forefinger or first 2 fingers of the right hand on the top. Use the last 3 fingers of the right hand to hold the shuttle thread up and out of the way when forming the first half of the doublestitch.

The shuttle is used to manoeuvre the shuttle thread around the "action" thread that is over the left hand. For the first half of the doublestitch, lift the shuttle thread up and out of the way. Spread the fingers of the left hand to keep the red thread tight. Slide the shuttle under the "action" thread.Don't let go of the shuttle, just let the red thread slip between the shuttle and the fingers, off the back of the shuttle and then pull the shuttle back out, letting the thread slip between the shuttle and the thumb.

Note that the shuttle is below both the shuttle thread and the "action" thread when you slide it under, but between the threads when you slide the shuttle out. That forms the first half of the stitch using the white shuttle thread.

Now to flip the stitch over to the red thread relax the left hand and pull the shuttle straight out to the right keeping the white thread tight. Alternating which thread is being held tight is what flips the stitch. Then extend the fingers of the left hand again to tighten the red thread and use the middle finger of the left hand to slide the first half of the stitch over until it's right against the knot that you are pinching. That's the first half done.

For the second half of the stitch again keep the red thread tight. Let the shuttle thread hang down in front of the "action" thread. Take the shuttle OVER the "action" thread and slide it butt end first underthe "action" thread and let the red thread slip between the shuttle and the forefinger.

Note that the shuttle is above both the shuttle thread and the "action" thread as you go over it, but between the threads as you pull the shuttle out. Again relax the fingers of the left hand and pull the shuttle straight out to the right. Keep the white shuttle thread tight, then extend the fingers of the left hand again using the middle finger to slide the second half of the stitch against the first half.That's the doublestitch completed.

Repeat until you have the specified number of stitches completed. You will see that all of the stitches are red - the colour of the thread over the back of the left hand. You can tell immediately that any stitches which are not red are not flipped.

Picots are created simply by leaving a little extra thread between stitches. When the stitches are slid together the extra thread makes a loop that is a picot. The more thread between the stitches, the bigger and lacier the picot will be.

Chains are created using both a shuttle thread and a chain or ball thread. Rings are created using only the shuttle thread. To tat a ring pinch the end of the shuttle thread. Wrap the thread up over the back of the fingers of the left hand as you did for the chain, but instead of winding it around the baby finger, bring the thread across the palm and pinch it again. You will have a complete circle around the fingers when tatting a ring. The formation of the stitches is identical to the chain. When you have completed the ring pull on the shuttle thread and the ring should slide closed. If the ring doesn't close then one or more stitches aren't flipped.

Usually you reverse work - turn the work upside down - when you switch from rings to chains and from chains to ring.

Rings and chains are joined to one another through the picots. Shuttles that have a hook on the front are more efficient for joins. Insert the hook into the picot and pull up a loop of "working" thread, then slide the shuttle through the loop. Use the fingers of the left hand to pull the loop back down trapping the shuttle thread underneath. Make sure that the shuttle thread still slides after the join. It is easier to check as you are working than to have to un-tat.

Older patterns are written in long form but newer patterns use visual diagrams where the circles or ovals represent rings, the arced lines represent chains and the short little lines or sometimes tiny loops represent picots. A join is indicated by a short line touching any two parts like two rings or two chains. The numbers shown around the outside of a ring represent the number of doublestitches to be tatted for each section of the ring.

For example a visual diagram of a ring might show an oval with a short line on each side and one on the top. If there was a number 7 above and another 7 below the short line on the left and two more 7's on the left. You would tat 7 doublestitches, leave a picot space, doing that 3 times then tat 7 more doublestitches before pulling on the shuttle thread to close the ring. The number of doublestitches required for each segment of a chain is usually shown alongside the chain.

Sometimes three rings are joined together forming a cloverleaf or trefoil. To form a cloverleaf, tat the first ring, do not reverse work. Tat the second ring, starting it as close to the first ring as possible leaving no gaps. Join it to the side of the first ring. Do not reverse work and tat the third ring close to the previous ring again joining the rings at the side. After all three rings are completed, reverse work to tat the chain.

A good diagram should let you visualize the finished lace even if you don't have a picture, but a picture always helps.

Floral Tatting

Several years ago I self published a book called Transitions in Tatting from Flat to Floral which is no longer in print. I'm thinking about re-printing just the floral part of the book as people keep asking me for flower patterns. The front cover shows you the flowers.

My criteria for these flowers was that they had to be life size, and they had to be constructed in such a way that wire wasn't needed for the flower to hold it's shape. The purple orchid on the upper right was tatted by Sue Hanson and was returned to her after the photo was taken. All of the other flowers have been sitting in the vase exactly like the picture since 2000 when the book was published. None of them have wilted yet!

The little white flower in the middle is a

Daisy

Then counter clockwise from the bottom left

Stargazer Lily

Daffodil

Red Carnation

Purple Tulip

White Carnation

Purple Cattleya Orchid

Daffodil

Delphinium

Orchid done in Purple Mauve and White

Red Tulip

Also included were Leaves for the Tulip and Daffodil and an English Ivy.

The designs were made especially for use in bridal bouquets and wedding veils.

I have the hard copy that I could have photocopied, but I'm not sure about the original drawings. In the course of going through several computer upgrades and changing hard drives 4 times I'm not sure if the old files are still intact. Having the hard copy to work from I could probably re-draw the flowers so that I could make them available again. Anyone interested in a book of flowers?

Blueberry? How about Cranberry Tea?

Having experimented with some left over cranberry sauce, I thought I'd try out some blueberry jam and see how blue it left the lace. The thread ends are more blue than the lace is. The lace is almost the same colour as the cranberry sample. How weird is that? Of course all of the additives made to the jam might be responsible for the reddish purple colour. Or maybe blueberry really is red!!!???

Notice the rings attached to the central ring? See that one of them is larger than the others? When I'm designing something new I start with a stitch count I think will work. If it doesn't I have the choice of starting again, or correcting the stitch count and continuing. If it's a scrap bit like this, I just keep going because I know it's going to have to be done over again anyway. Sometimes, you just need to do a test piece.

I made a double batch of cranberry sauce this year. Half of it was meant to go with the turkey and the other half formed the base for orange cranberry raisin filling for some Christmas cookies. I made the sauce with orange juice instead of water and that may have affected both the overall colour and the staying power of the cranberry colour. I had a lot of cranberry sauce and filling left over so I did some more experimenting.

I have done some butterflies that will be added to a plain T-shirt and one of them got dropped into a cup of tea. Brown isn't really a pretty butterfly colour so I dunked it into some cranberry sauce and mashed the berries into it. Here's Cranberry Tea:

I like it better than tea colour, but I mashed it hard enough to cut the thread. Either I sew it down fixing the break by tacking it in place or I cut out the break and re-do the chain after first matching the cranberry tea colour. Who am I kidding? I'm totally going to sew this mistake down.

Cranberry!

I like to wear plain cotton shirts. They feel good and they're more comfortable when I have "power surges". What I don't like is that:

A. Ladies cotton T's cost more than twice the price of men's.
B. I in variably splash tomato sauce on them.
C. The parrot's claws go right through the fabric poking lots of little holes through the shoulders.

That being the case I either walk around in tattered and stained clothes or I replace my shirts more often than the average woman. Which brings me back to A. So I have been buying a lot of men's T's and adding tatting to them. Since I splash a lot of whatever I'm cooking onto my shirts anyway, I was wondering what it would look like if I used natural dyes on fabric and or tatting.



Want to see Cranberry?





For how very red the fruit is, the lace looks kind of purple. I mashed a couple of berries into this little bit of white tatting then rinsed the residue off and washed the lace in a bit of dish soap. The colour isn't even and while I like how it looks on lace, I'm not sure what it would look like on a shirt. Of course if I ran the cranberry sauce, minus the sugar, through a blender, strained it and then left the shirt soaking in it for a good while I might get a darker and more even colour. Judging by the way the cranberry stains aren't coming out of my clothes even with repeated washings, I can be reasonable sure that this colour won't ever run.

The lace is just a little doodle of something or other I was designing so it was a scrap bit. Now that it's such a pretty colour I'll have to do something with it.

Back to Blogging

I suppose it's typical of the season that people are busy doing lots of seasonal activities and consequently we don't have a lot of time for blogging. I've managed to keep the 25 motif challenge blog reasonably up to date and at long last the November newsletter has been sent out. That's right, here it is in the middle of December and I've only just sent out the newsletter. I usually put lots of Christmas-y patterns in the November newsletter, but I realize that a lot of people like the Christmas theme designs earlier so that they can actually tat them as Christmas gifts. Consequently some of the designs were in the August issue.

Here's a picture of the snowflake I sent out this year with my Christmas cards. Does it remind you of anything? It should, it's another variation of the same snowflake. More stitches on the inner rings and the chains, extra little rings in between the chains and some beads added in, but still the same general idea. Since my last posting I've done over a dozen of these flakes as well as re-tatting the pink doily and various other small snowflakes and earrings. The pattern for these are in the newsletter and those of you who subscribe to it will find it in your in-box.

Now, I'm going to take my aching thumbs and give them a rest, right after I update the challenge page.

More things to do with snowflakes

One of the easiest things you can do with a snowflake is join several of them together. Snowflakes are supposed to have six sides as that just happens to be the natural shape of ice crystals. When you put a grouping of hexagons together in a round shape you use 7 hexagons, one in the middle and one attached to each of the six sides.

Several years ago I needed to create a doily in a hurry. My inspiration was nothing more than I just needed a quick gift. Having crocheted a lot of granny squares, knew that 7 joined hexagons would make a doily and I had 8 different hexagon shapes to choose from. The largest of the 8 designs was Snowflake 4, so it was my obvious choice. I tatted the 7 motives and joined ten together by their points.

That made a nice little grouping, but the motives were very pointy and they didn't have a nice smooth outer edge so the doily looked unfinished. If you have ever tatted a doily, you know that the further from the centre you get the longer it takes to tat a round and I didn't have a lot of time.

The simplest method of bringing it all together was just to tat a row of chain around the circumference of the motives. At the point where 3 motives were joined there were 3 cloverleaves. On the outer edge that meant that there were only 2 cloverleaves, so for continuity I tatted a cloverleaf of matching proportions at that point. Where there was just one cloverleaf, I tatted a single ring and joined them together by a chain.

The chains of the first row were deliberately made long both to save time and to separate the edging from the motives. The less connected it was, the less I had to figure out as far as matching the motif design. I could have worked the edging around each ring of the cloverleaf and followed the outer contour of the motives but it would have taken a lot more tatting and a lot more thinking. As it was, the negative space added a design element and made it easier to work the edging.

The single row had no depth or substance to it. It was just a big floppy chain. Adding the second row with more connecting points made it more solid and gave it shape. When you add an edging to something you want to repeat part of the theme to make it match and look like it belongs. The sparse 2 rows of edging added to the motives is kind of skimpy because I was short of time and had to make this in less than a week, but it still works.

Turning a snowflake into a heart

One of the basic things you need to think about when you are designing something is it's shape. What is the general outline? Is it square? Round? Oblong? A snowflake is mostly round with some points, and the little parts that make up the whole fit together like pieces of a pie with each piece of the pie being a single pattern repeat.

If you want to make a heart, how would you describe the shape? Hearts kind of look like triangles. Some are short and fat and some are tall and skinny, but all of them are wider at the top than the bottom and all of them have a point at the bottom.

If you want to start with a snowflake and turn it into a heart, what part of a round snowflake could you fit into a heart? Are there bits that hang over the edges? Are there areas you have to fill in?


Take a look at this picture. Does it give you any ideas? One of the smallest heart shapes you can make is just a simple cloverleaf surrounded by a chain. If you take a look at a lot of the heart patterns available, you'll see that may of them use a cloverleaf as their base. In a simple cloverleaf heart the central picot is often made longer to accentuate the heart shape.

Let's say you want to make a heart that's bigger than a cloverleaf. Do the circles in the picture suggest anything else? How about 3 snowflakes?

When you create a snowflake, you want a six sided shape with points at the tip of each side. For the purpose of creating a heart the points just get in the way, so the extra bits that make a round motif into a snowflake are just omitted.

Look at the area of the heart shape not covered by the circles. Notice that there are 2 small triangular areas on either side and another at the bottom. To create a heart from 3 snowflakes you need to add a little bit of tatting in between each top motif and the bottom one, and another little bit at the bottom to accentuate the heart shape.

Attaching motives together gives you the right general outline, but if you want an unmistakable heart you need to tie it all together by adding a defining row of chain.


That's what I did with this heart. I used the centre part of Snowflake 5 and omitted the outward facing rings. The 2 top motives are joined along the flat side of the hexagon shape and the bottom one joins at the point of the hexagon shape. That arrangement meant that the top motives were rounder and the bottom one had a point at the bottom.

The shape suggested a heart, but it really became a heart when the outer row of chain was added connecting to the middle of each chain on the motives and adding the cloverleaf to fill that space between the motives on each side. Since the bottom motif already had a downward point, adding a cloverleaf would have been too much. A single outward facing ring was enough to finish it off.

If the motif had been more round and not quite so pointed, a cloverleaf could have been used.
The same thing can be done with any round motif. Just select a design you like, attach 3 of them together in a triangular shape and then fill in the spaces to make your own heart.

A closer look at snowflakes

Take a look at the picture of the original snowflakes again. Now that we have examined some of them in detail, let's look at them all. See how snowflakes 1, 2, 6 and 8 all have the same centres? The variations come on the outward facing rings.

Snowflakes 3 and 4 have the same centre ring with inward facing cloverleaves attached to it, but different outward facing rings. Snowflakes 5 and 7 are different again. Instead of all rings or all cloverleaves in the middle, these 2 designs alternate a single inward ring with a cloverleaf. That presents a problem. Did you notice it?

In these designs all of the rings have been the same size (3-3-3-3-3-3 for a total of 18 stitches) A cloverleaf has 3 rings and it's bigger than a single ring. The middle ring of a cloverleaf is taller than a single ring of the same stitch count.

Take a look at the picture of Snowflake 3 shown here. A line has been drawn through the cloverleaf showing where it joins to the cloverleaves on either side. See how that connecting line is below the base of the middle ring? If the cloverleaf with the line through it is removed and replaced with a single ring, something has to be adjusted. That single ring will have to be much larger than that middle ring of the cloverleaf in order for the cloverleaves on either side to join to the centre of it.

You can see snowflakes 5 & 7 have alternating cloverleaves, and larger single rings (3-3-3-3-3-3-3-3 for a total of 24 stitches). This allows the joining picots of the cloverleaf to join to the second and sixth picot of the larger single ring.

Choker - 2nd try

We already looked at my first attempt at making a suitable medallion. While I was doing the next medallion I had time to think about how to make the basic snowflake #3 a little bigger, but not as big as my first try.

I know I haven't fully dealt with the medallion yet, but as a designer you need to think of the whole project as well as the individual pieces. If you have 2 parts that need to fit together you have to design them both together so that the connecting parts - connect.

My second step was to create a band for the medallion. It needed to be something similar to the medallion so that they looked like they belonged together, not too skinny, and not too wide. I also had to think about how to attach the band. I could easily just tat them separately, but there are fewer ends if you can do it in one piece. The medallion was going to start with the snowflake so I was using both cloverleaves and individual rings and cloverleaves are a bigger shape for a wider band.

You want to think about the profile of different elements of tatting when you are designing a piece of lace. The diagram at the left shows nose to nose cloverleaves. It makes a nice wide band, but it is kind of ordinary and boring.The point where the 2 middle rings connect makes solid bars and where the side ring of one cloverleaf connects with the next cloverleaf there is an empty space. Visually it gives a ladder effect, which wasn't quite what I had in mind for the band.

I had used the inward facing cloverleaves to keep the small outer rings in place on the medallion but I really didn't need anything that large. As I looked at my first try I realized that I could just add in more little outer rings and that would give me the size I needed and it would still give me the filigree effect. So on the next snowflake I put some picots on the chain on either side of the small ring and I did a second row with chains and small rings filling in the spaces.

The partial drawing on the right is the design I ended up with. There is no stitch count and only part of the drawing. This is a design primer after all, you're supposed to be figuring this stuff out.





As I was making the outer ring and chain row, I realized I could just continue the chain right on out to the band doing chains and cloverleaves, then turn it at the end and come back doing more chains and cloverleaves and just continue around the rest of the medallion, repeating it on the second side, doing it all in one piece. I like things that are all in one piece, that means fewer ends to hide.



Those cloverleaves really are boring. So I dropped off one small side ring and ended up with a whole cloverleaf sandwiched in between 2 partial cloverleaves. It gave the same width to the band, but it broke up the ordinary cloverleaf shape and as an overall visual effect, resulted in solid blocks of colour separated by negative space in the band.



And again here is the drawing of the band without the stitch count.


Sometimes designing means that you do some things by planning and some things by trial and error. You can see the final results here. The picture shows the medallion and one side of the choker.

You can easily create your own choker. Select a snowflake you like, add a row to make it round or square or diamond shape, or whatever you like and add a matching row of edging for a band.

If you have and questions or comments, go ahead and ask and I'll try to answer them