Tatting for Bells

Okay, Bells, here is some tatting.

Obligatory apology for my cheap camera, with no close-up capability. I'm afraid the flash really washes out the detail.

The red and white doily at the top was something I made up at a demo. It is made of size 10 crochet cotton, which I don't usually use to tat except at demos. At demos, I like to use a big enough thread so people can see what is happening.

Then we have a blue snowflake and a red-white-and-green star, both from Monica Hahn's Christmas Angels and Other Patterns. These two are beaded around the edge, although the beads don't show up in the picture.

On the white piece of paper, the tatted, beaded Christmas tree is also from Christmas Angels and Other Patterns. Both of the other two patterns are adaptations. The blue snowflake was derived from a pattern in Tatting Doilies and Edgings, edited by Rita Weiss. I started the pattern, realized I had messed it up by halving the stitch count in the very first ring, and ended up halving all the stitch counts.

The white snowflake below the paper is the same pattern, and this is the pattern I used to make the silver one I gave away at the exchange. (That would be the one I forgot to get a picture of.)

The purple and pale green medallion on the paper is adapted from a pattern in Sophie T. LaCroix's Old and New Desings in Tatting, which I scored on eBay after trying to win a copy for quite a while. I remember that I worked my first try at this medallion in shaded green and white tatting thread on an Amtrak train to Chicago. (Funny how memories get encoded in the thread that way.)

The square medallion is four joined motifs from Tatting Patterns, edited by Julia Sanders. The design is kind of hidden in the book, used as a pillowcase insertion.

Tatting Patterns is one of my favorite books, although it's a reprint and not always easy to follow. I like how a lot of the motifs are designed. They seem like they were thought out ahead of time, and maybe reworked after the idea was tried out so they would look good in tatting. (That's not true of all tatted designs, some of which seem more like my red and white doily: just made up as they went along and stretched or squeezed to fit.)

My copy has a loud pink cover with a tatted medallion on it in orange and brown 1970's earth tones, but I see at Dover that they have Photoshopped the background to light blue, and the medallion to purples.

Now I really better lug out the Christmas tree stand so I don't get yelled at when school gets out!