Tatting With Yarn

I’ve become intrigued by the idea of tatting with the Koigu brand merino wool yarn sold at Wildfibers, a very cool yarn shop in Santa Monica.  It’s a fun place to visit.  They have nice couches for hanging out and stitching, they’re open late on Wednesdays, put out snacks customers, and the employees all seem to think tatting is pretty cool (once I showed them what it was, that is.)

Only one problem.  Other than a little bit of embroidery floss they don’t sell anything immediately identifiable as tat-able.  I picked up some yarn for a friend for Christmas, but wanted to find something I would buy on a semi-regular basis so that I would be able to justify to myself coming in and spending time sitting on their couches tatting.  (My semi-regular crafting group only meets once a month so it’s nice to have found another place where I can always stop by and sit and tat in a non-solitary environment.)

They sell remnants of the Koigu yarn a while back and I picked up a piece to try tatting with it.  It worked surprisingly well.  It’s not ideal for tatting.  You have to tat rings a bit looser to be able to close them easily (and it’s best if they’re small rings).  Retro-tatting is a pain in the butt, but it does work.  The colors of this yarn are simply amazing.  Their website is a bit unfinished and they don’t have a good page that shows the colors so I’m going to send you to this page which shows a picture of a book with some of the different yarn colors on it.  It’ll give you the idea, at least.

After tatting the bracelet I picked up a couple skeins of this yarn with the plan of making another belt out of it.  I’ve even had the pattern picked out for a while (from Priscilla, of course) but I’ve been waiting until I could pick up some bigger shuttles.  I really do not want to have to try adding more thread in the middle of a project with this stuff.  Luckily, I think I can get an entire skein wound onto two (overwound) Tatsy shuttles, CTM.  For this new project I picked out two skeins and will just use a small bit from each.  I should probably try another project with a full skein so I can get a better idea of how much tatting I can get out of a skein, but that will have to wait for the future.  No projects that I want to do with the yarn are coming to mind at the moment and the yarn is expensive enough that I don’t want to buy some just for an experiment.  Luckily, they often have a remnants basket at Wildfibers with small pieces of this yarn.  The bracelet above was made with one of the remnants.  Since you need so little yarn for tatting I’ll be exploring that basket a lot.  Unfortunately, they were sold out of remnants the last time I was there, but I really like the colors I bought so I’m sure I’ll be happy using them for a long time.

 

3 Comments »

  1. Jane S. Said,

    November 30, 2011 @ 7:13 pm

    That is a beautiful bracelet, nice simple pattern with fabulous color! I have a skein of Koigu that I bought years ago, one of their discontinued colors so it was on sale. I’ve never done anything with it because I don’t have enough to knit anything big, but I might have to try tatting a bracelet!

  2. admin Said,

    November 30, 2011 @ 8:03 pm

    This was the smallest remnant I could find at the time and there was still enough to make a tiny little flower for a barrette. It really doesn’t take much for tatting at all.

  3. Sue Said,

    December 1, 2011 @ 1:21 pm

    I love the colors and the design of that bracelet!!! 🙂

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