Pattern Reworking

Here’s an update/reworking of the #45 tatted edging from Butterick’s Tatting and Netting 1896 reprint–that is to say, a tatting pattern old enough that the author seems to think working chains is a revolutionary idea that will come as a mild surprise to her readers.  The original is…weird; no two rings have the same number of stitches and the directions are wonky.  I’ve omitted the tiny little thrown ring that serves no perceptible purpose, regularized the stitch counts, and modified the center ring of the Small Clover a little.

Start with a Small Clover.  Each ring joins to the last picot of the one before.

Ring 1: 6-3-3
Ring 2: 3+3-3-3-3-3 (5 picots total)
Ring 3: 3+3-6

Reverse work and Chain 3-6-3-3-3-3-6-3 (7 picots total)

Reverse work and make a Large Clover

Ring 1: 6-3-3-3-3+to first P of R3 of Small Clover 3-3-6 (7 picots total)
Ring 2: 6+3-3-3-3-6 (5 picots total)
Ring 3: 6+3-3-3-3-3-3-3-3-6 (9 picots total)
Ring 4: As Ring 2
Ring 5: As Ring 1

Reverse work and work a second chain, 3+6-3-3-3-3-6-3.  This forms the repeat of the pattern.  (For second and subsequent Small Clovers, the first picot of Ring 1 instead joins to Ring 5 of Large Clover.)

Here’s a sample in progress in Lizbeth Size 80 (color #165):

First Stop

Done with the sleeves for the blue Thermal, so I’m going to put it on hold for a bit while I finish a second pair of Kingdom gloves–this time in a color that’s light enough to see the cables.  I have many sweaters; I need some darn gloves and since I managed to lose one of the dark green ones after one wearing, I am forced to knit again.  Fortunatly gloves are fast.

For some reason I’m having a lot of fun tatting for my sampler book.  Maybe because I only have to do one or two repeats of each pattern.

Material Experiment

I keep running across patterns for tatting that I’d like to save. But just writing down the pattern doesn’t help me, six months later, remember why I liked a particular pattern, nor is it much use when I’m going through thinking, “OK, I want something with triangular points…”  The solution is samples: short lengths of edgings or insertions, one medallion of motif patterns.

So I bought myself a cheap small notebook.  The problem then becomes what thread to use for my samples, as size 10 crochet cotton will be hopelessly bulky.  The solution?  I’m tatting my samples in Sulky rayon machine embroidery thread.  Not only is it teeny, it comes in hundreds of colors so I can have colorful samples, both for effect and to make constructions easier to see; Round 1 can be red and white while round two is gold and blue, or whatever.

There are some problems I’d like to solve before I did any real projects with the stuff; it’s basically impossible to unpick mistakes, picots have to be a little out of proportion to be used for joins, and knots that are not the larks’-heads of the tatting itself are not particularly stable, so I’d need a creative way of dealing with ends.  But for this purpose it’s great.

Sadly, I can’t use it for crochet examples; it’s just too darn thin and even my smallest hook is too big for it, plus it’s slippery as hell.  Crochet will have to be in cotton after all, if I do an example notebook for it.

Lacy

Work on the tablecloth has stalled the last week or so.  I fear that my hands have lost the taste for it again.  Still, I got all the foundation motifs, the eternal ring-and-chain, and several side scallops done; not bad for this push, if indeed it’s over.  Maybe I should make it a dedicated work project, something to do at lunch.

Got to dig up the other long side, too, so I can see about putting them together sometime.  I know it came from Aspinwall with me, as I distinctly remember getting it off the shelf it was stored on.  I just can’t recall what I did with it after that.  Maybe in the under-bed storage thing my mom got me?  (Which is, naturally, too tall to go under my bed…)

The phrase “other long side” may be misleading in this instance, as that was the plan when the target table was rectangular.  Liam’s dinner table is square, and though it has leaves that make it a rectangle, the current long cloth side is about right for one of the table’s non-extensible sides.  I think I’m going for square; the concept of 48- or (gods help me) 56-motif-long sides makes my hands cramp just thinking about it.

I’ve Got a Use for This

I’ve picked up the Neverending Tablecloth again, despite the fact that there’s a sock sitting around here somewhere half-done. In part I was inspired by another box from California, which included the book that the pattern’s in–I had forgotten how hard these patterns were to decipher, too, as the language varies between spelling every little thing out in excruciating detail and assuming that you’ll understand a vague allusion to “the last one”.

Anyway, it got me to thinking about the decorative versions of fiber art. Knitting, for example, can make perfectly functional things: sweaters, socks, bags. Of course it can also make frilly and decorative things like wedding ring shawls and beaded purses, but when it comes right down to it knitting is a Useful Skill. Other things in this category include weaving, crochet, sewing, netting.

Tatting really isn’t Useful. Everyone can live without lace edges on their pillowcases and snowflake Christmas ornaments. Even the Tablecloth would be more useful–that is, more likely to protect the surface of the table–if it were solid cloth rather than lacy. Tatting’s tougher than your average lace, making it theoretically suitable for garment construction, but nothing made solely of tatting is going to be particularly warm, protective, modest, or anything other than decorative. Indeed, the kind of dense work you’d have to do to make a useful tatted purse would really defeat the purpose of having it be tatted at all; you’d be better off using the thread to crochet with. I suppose one might make a tatted dishcloth…but then who would use it? The big techniques here are the various laces–tatted, bobbin, needle–beading, and embroidery. These are things you do to prove you had the leisure to do them, or have to prove you could afford to buy them.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m all for pretty for the sake of pretty. I think it’s a shame that the world today has so little concern for making things attractive; I think there’d be less graffiti if more walls had murals, and I’m highly in favor of whoever it was who decided that the lightpoles in my neighborhood needed to have flowers painted on them. There’s definitely a place in my worldview for embellishment.

But this, I think, is the reason that some techniques are never going to be big: in order to embellish something, you have to have a functional object first. A length of lace, no matter how beautiful, isn’t going to do any good without a dress to put it on; a pair of embroidered gloves is great, but you have to have the gloves first. And there are only so many pincushions, bookmarks, eyeglass cases, needle books, and wall hangings one person needs to own. A bridge-table cloth with the symbols of the suits in tatting is not an item that any sane person would consider a necessity of life; a pair of socks might be. There’s a great trade in “useful items to embellish”, like baby’s bibs made of evenweave fabric for the crosstitchers.

I do believe I’ve stumbled upon one of the reasons crafty people have a reputation for giving away their work: their own walls are already covered in Teresa Wentzler dragons, so to keep enjoying their craft they have to find other people to take the results. It also likely has something to do with the Victorian tendency to embroider or attach lace to anything that didn’t run away fast enough–here were all these middle- and upper-class women with nothing much to do but nonessential needlework, and after a while they started running out of obvious things to do with it.