Adventures in Tatting

On Thursday night, my friend introduced me to the wonderful world of tatting.  She taught me the basics: double stitch, picot, join, chain, and ring.

My practice thread.  It starts out with a chain of double stitches using two threads.  The the work goes to a single thread as she taught me how to make rings.  Then I learned how to add picots.  After I had practiced two rings with picots side by side, she decided I needed to learn how to join rings through a picot.  Then I started making a flower.  I got partway around it and realized that my gap between petals was too large.  So I abandoned the partial flower to start on my first project.

This project was started and completed Friday morning.  I had a lot of fun making it.

This is my first completed (minus tucking in the final strings) project.  I needed youtube's help to learn a few more steps for this project.

When I first tried joining the last petal of my flower to the first petal of my flower it ended up twisted.  So I undid my join and started hunting for a video.  I found one that showed me how to make a folded join to complete a circular motif.  I also learned how to add a bead to the center of a tatted ring, which I practiced at the end of my bracelet chain.  I also stumbled across a fantastic way to hide tail threads, unfortunately, it was after I had already finished my bracelet.  So until I get around to buying a special needle, my tails will remain loose on this one.

Close up of the flower details.

Another shot of my first complete flower.

On to project number two, which I started Saturday.  This project uses the pattern found here, except that I've added an extra picot on the two outer rings of the clover.

Project #2 - Rambling Flowers Pattern

I started this project with two threads and used the thread hiding method found here.  I also learned how to open a closed ring, because I accidentally closed the center ring of the second clover a picot and five double stitches sooner than I should have.  I wouldn't want to make a habit out of reopening closed rings, but it wasn't as painful as the tutorial made it sound.

I am very excited to work on this project some more this morning and, after church, I will be meeting with the gal that taught me to show her my progress and to tat some more.