Motif 8: Onion doily

Those onion rings are still occupying space in my head, so I made this little onion ring doily.

This is the 'Green Vedallia' doily from Roger AKA Freedman's needle tatting site.  My version should be called 'Yellow onions and shallots'.

I have great memories of the needle tatting boards.  I learned to tat in my teens, but I had trouble getting past simple one ring edgings.  The problem was those old line by line patterns.  I didn't know it then, but I' miserable without a diagram.  I slogged at it though, because I really liked the look of the lace.

Then in my twenties, I found the needle tatting boards.  There were many lovely intermediate patterns that I wanted to try.  The things is, I don't needle tat so half the instructions sounded like gobbledygook.  The instructions didn't make sense, but Roger AKA Freedman has some of clearest pictures I'd ever seen.

It finally hit me that I didn't need the words.  I just needed the pictures and the stitch counts and I could figure it out myself.  It was a eureka moment for me and I've been a happy tatter ever since.

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 :)

Motif 6: Butterflies old and new

I have two butterflies to show. The first is this little motif from Tatted Butterflies by Adelheid Dangela, done in hand dyed Cebelia 20. I just got the book last week. There are no written directions, just some charming hand drawn diagrams. I love it! No words means I can just dive right in and tat.

 

Next is this butterfly from last year. The little lady claimed it, and I finally put it on a dress for her birthday earlier this month. I tried a new technique for attaching the butterfly. First, I sprayed the back of the tatting with spray mount. Then I stuck the butterfly on the dress and stitched down the picots with a sort of running stitch.

The spray adhesive worked much better than the method I used for the little lady's snowflake dress. For that dress, I pinned down the snowflakes. The pins distorted the motifs and I ended up pulling out a lot of stitches. The spray mount made the butterfly stick, sort of like masking tape. I could stitch the picots down very quickly, and the spray came out easily in the wash. I probably wouldn't try this on an heirloom, or something delicate, but for something utilitarian, it works great.

Here are some close-ups. Here's the butterfly on the front.

There are pink bias binding strips for straps, and a teardrop for the back. The button is purple. It doesn't match, but it's the little lady's favourite colour (after pink of course).

I'm making a lot of sleeveless dresses lately, for two reasons:-
1) There are few things lovelier than a little girl in a sun dress
2) I'm afraid of sleeve caps

Anyway, that's all from me today. My workload hasn't really decreased, but I've found that trying to make more time by not crafting just makes me cranky and unproductive. So hopefully the next post won't take a whole month.

Utilitarian and reversible

Deadlines are thick on the ground, so I can't seem to manage any crafts that require counting higher than two.  Tatting is right out.  That leaves me with garter stitch knitting, crochet snakes, and strangely, fine hand embroidery.

I've also been doing some machine sewing of the utilitarian sort.  First is a set of chair covers and bags.

The chair covers are to save my mother's lovely solid wood chairs from having felt glued to their backs.  My mother wanted to put the chairs against the wall, but was afraid the backs would scratch the wall.  The bags are a wedding gift for a friend.

Next are some quick draw string bags to hold the birthday loot from my little guy's big day last week.  There were three, but the last one went home with my nephew.

I think household stuff works better and lasts longer if it's lined.  If I'm going to go to the trouble of lining something, I might as well make it reversible.  Everything here is reversible, which is why there are two pictures of everything.





 

Motif 5: Final snowflakes (or maybe not)

These snowflakes have been done for a while now, but for some reason, they were feeling shy and felt they needed blocking.  How does the saying go again?  90% of the effort is in the last 10% of the job?  I believe it.  Blocking, taking pictures and posting seem to take 2-3 times as long as the actual tatting.

 

 

These are the last 3 snowflakes in Jon's Tatted Snowflake Collection.   From left to right, these are 'Milky Way', 'Carousel' and 'The Twirly'.  Originally, I had all sorts of plans to make these in metallic thread, or silk, or using some fancy new technique.  In the end I just used DMC Cebelia 30 and a pair or Aero shuttles.  I love learning new techniques, but sometimes it's good to remember how much fun it is to tat.

 

These are just in time too.  Jon just showed the pictures for her new book.  Ooo, what fun!  These won't be the last snowflakes after all!

Sun dresses

It's hot here.  You'd think that being in a tropical country, this would be an obvious statement.  Right now though, it's hotter than normal.   It's almost too hot to tat since the double knots won't form properly when the thread is wet, and sweaty hands make for wet thread.  It's almost too hot to crochet and knit, because who wants to look at warm yarn or wool when it's hot.

So what's a crafter to do?  Make sun dresses!

The first is a dress for a neighbour's one year old.  It's made from a batik sarong.  The sarongs in Malaysia have borders and panels in different patterns.  So if you cut the pieces right, you can get nice hems without any effort.

 

For the finishing touch, I put little green flower buttons.

Next is a dress for the little lady.  Clothes for the little lady always involve a lenghty discussion about fashion sense and sensibility.  In this case she chose the fabric herself (Can't fault her taste there.  I'd have snagged the piece for myself if she hadn't picked it first).  Then she told me it should be a princess dress! with puff sleeves! and bows! and hearts!  I told here, ummm....  how about some flowers...

So, a few ribbon flowers on the bodice, and a few more along the hem, and we are both happy.  I avoid making puff sleeves, and she has a 'be-u-diful' dress.

Scrambled tatting

I'm trying to teach myself some new tatting tricks, and it's giving me a bit of headache. The first trick is to tat without shuttles. I'm trying to learn this because I'm in love with the Riego join as taught by TATBiT.  It's just so clever and beautiful, with one thread slipped into the other, no extra bulk, no blips.  The thing is, it requires that the thread be off the shuttle. The only tool I'm using is a little floss threader to pull the thread through.

It's actually pretty comfortable just finger tatting.  At first, I worried about having to do a lot of adding new thread since I'm working with shorter lengths.  It turns out that it's not that much of an issues since using encapsulation, adding thread is actually one of the easier things to do in tatting,  The only issue is that the threads tend to tangle, which makes the whole thing less portable.

The second thing I'm trying to learn is to tat Reverse Riego, again as taught by TATBiT.  I still prefer to tat using the slip-n-slide method, but with beads, it causes problems.  First, you just can't get a lot of beads onto a shuttle. Next, once the beads are on there, they have to be 'managed'. All unused beads have to be wound up into the shuttle.  If they get loose, they get caught in the stitches, messing up the works.

Both of these problems drove me nuts when I was working on a Nina Libin necklace.  In desperation, I switched tatting styles, and it worked!  The Reverse Riego method is somehow looser than the slip-n-slide.  There's a lot of slack in the thread, so there's time to push the beads out of the way before the stitch closes. It means I can spend more time making stitches and less time winding up beads.

Also, with reverse riego, you can use just about anything to hold the thread.  As TATBiT suggests, I'm using a netting shuttle.  It's shocking how many beads this thing can hold.  It makes the whole bead tatting experience more pleasant for me.

My Aeros are looking a bit sad and empty right now.  It think I'll start some snowflakes and give my brain a rest.