Lots of Tatting. Very Little to Show For It

Believe it or not, this little motif took me almost two hours to get right.  Sure it was two hours in which I was slightly distracted by watching TV, but still.  Two hours for this simple ring and chain circle.

I’m tackling the large tea cloth in the Priscilla #2 book. It’s a gorgeous piece and one of the things that drew me to the Priscilla books in the first place.  But is so often the case of the patterns in the Priscilla books, it’s taking a bit of tweaking to get right.

The main difference seems to be the change in the length of the joining picots.  These days picots are usually shorter and most of the ones in the Priscilla books seem to be much longer.  Shortening the picots shortens the outer size of the circle and made it twist back on itself the first few variations I tried.  The original pattern calls for rings of 2-2-2-2 and chains of 4.  I tried that and then tried rings the same and chains of 3, but even that would twist them.  Chains of 2 seemed to be too far in the other direction and I didn’t want to change the stitch count on the rings at all so in the end I went with chains alternating between 2 and 3.  It was a bit tricky to keep track of while tatting, but it seemed to work.

For this particular pattern it may not end up mattering so I may go with chains of 3 since it wasn’t far off and if the rest of the pattern stretches it out some it will work just as well.  We’ll see.  I’m looking forward to tackling some of the other motifs in this t

ea cloth, but at the moment I’m just focusing the center part – the first 4 rounds.  In the close up here, though you can see that there’s going to be a lot more of these little circular motifs so they’re going to keep me busy.  Unfortunately this also means lots and lots of ends to hide.  As usual, I’m doing my first run through in size 10 Royle thread and not worrying about the ends, but eventually I’ll want them to look nicer.  I’ve see a partially finished version and it’s much larger than you would first expect.  The Lace Museum in Sunnyvale has one that has the center octagon finished (up to the point that the cloth pieces start) and even in a small thread it’s quite large.  I had been thinking of making it in size 80, but as I look at it again and contemplate having to sew in all those ends I’m rethinking that idea.  I think I’ll still make a couple versions of the center part (the first 4 rounds) in different sizes just for the size comparison, and to see how it goes.  Since I started sewing in ends (instead of using the magic thread trick) I haven’t used size 40 or 50 much so maybe once I use them a bit more I’ll find they’re not too difficult to sew in.

Been working on a lot of other projects over the last couple weeks.  Hope to get around to writing more about them soon.

 

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