A couple weeks ago I decided to try dying some of my own thread.  Actually, I decided quite a while ago that I wanted to give it a try, but hadn’t gotten around to it.  Then a couple weeks ago I had a dream in which I was wearing a dress decorated with hand-dyed-thread of a very specific color.  The next day while teaching my tatting class at Piecemakers in Costa Mesa I found that they had two random boxes of r.i.t. dye, one of which looked like it was exactly the color I dreamed about.  Of course, I had to get it and try it that very night.  Nevermind that I was visiting my parents that night or that I got to their place after 10pm.  Luckily they were out of town that night and wouldn’t be back until late the next day so I was able to stay up until 5am dying thread.

I already had a bunch of skeins wound up because I had a couple balls of a not-very-good white thread that I wanted to use up, but didn’t know what to do with.  I figured I’d sacrifice them to my dying experiments since I wouldn’t be very upset if they were wasted.  So I had a couple skeins wound of size 30 of some unknown brand and a bunch of size 10 in Royal.  Years ago I bought 3 of the gigantic skeins of Royal in white and I’d only used about a half of one.  By the end of the night of playing with dye I’d finished that one off and made a pretty good dent in the second.

I also wanted to try dying thread with food coloring so I did that first.  Didn’t really work for me.  I added a few drops of food coloring and vinegar to the hot water (the way that I dye eggs), and when I rinsed the thread all the color washed out and I was left with some very pastel colors which weren’t really what I was going for.  I left it out to dry and even though I thought I’d gotten all the color that was going to wash out it still left a faint bit of color on the papertowels when I went back to look at it, so I think it will probably still fade a bit more with time.

After the food coloring failed I switched to the real fabric dye and not surprisingly it worked great.  :)  Mostly I was just experimenting and trying things out with the amount of dye and the length of time the thread was left in the water.  I tried a couple variegated skeins and they worked pretty well.

My modest dying bucket was a cottage cheese container. I put it on a piece of plastic (actually a old cearal bag) that hung over the sink so when I made the varigates by hanging the skein over the side it would drain into the sink.  I ended up making a lot more than I intended to, but I figured as long as I had dye left in the water I should just keep winding up skeins and playing around with it.  Seemed like a shame to waste the dye so I just kept adding hot water and going and going until it was 5am.  The dyed thread kept getting fainter and fainter and finally I left one last skein in the water and went to bed.  When I woke up it had soaked up the rest of the water and the dye and looked pretty nice.

They dried pretty slowly just sitting on the counter so I ended up taking a hair drier to them to try to get my parents kitchen back to normal by the time they got home.  I’ve done a bit of tatting with the thread since then and I like the way it came out.  It wasn’t very uniform and I have a lot more respect for all the thread dyers out there who are able to make an exact science out of it and end up with a uniform product.  Since I wasn’t really going for any specific colors or variegates it all looks great to me.

I used only a really small amount of the dye so I’ll definitely play around with it some more.  Last time I was at Piecemakers then I bought the other color of dye they had which is a golden yellow.  I’m not big on multicolor threads, but I’ll probably give it a try or two at some point.  Luckily I bought a huge amount of white thread on clearance when all the Joanns in Southern CA stopped carrying thread so I’ve got a lot to use up.  Problem is that all this thread is going to take a really long time to tat with and I’m trying to shrink my supply stash.  I guess I’ve figured out what to give to tatters for Christmas…

Decided to take on another pattern from the Priscilla books.  I really liked the scallops on this edging.  So I gave it a go with some thread that I picked up at Piecemakers in Costa Mesa after teaching there.  This was an old ball of thread so it was sort of rough and tricky to tat with and there wasn’t much left on it, but I really liked the color so I decided to just go with it and tat a nice edging until I ran out.  Got about a yard or so out of it.

The title of this post comes from the fact that I really tried to push it and get just out one more repeat of the pattern.  I got it, but look what I had left to work with!  About 4 inches on one thread and less than an inch on the other.  I was amazed I made it work.  Would have been depressing to have it come so close and not work and to have to go back and cut in down to one repeat less.  No hiding in ends for this on.  I just tied and cut.  I figure that was appropriate since both the thread and pattern are from a time when that was the standard practice.

Not actually sure what I’m going to do with it but it looks pretty.  I’m thinking maybe  put it on a pillowcase or something.  I’ll go through the pattern in another post.  I expect I’ll do a lot more with it.  I think it’d look very nice in a small thread with some beads so maybe next time I try size 80.

Wow.  Has it really been that long since I’ve posted?  I haven’t stopped tatting, but been so busy with a lot of travel that I haven’t had a set routine for more than a few days which is what I need to get myself posting.  We’re about to start a pledge drive here at the public radio station that I work at so things are about to get real busy, but expect them to also settle into a routine and hopefully I’ll get some more posting done to type up all the fun stuff I’ve been doing.

One very cool thing I did last month was to teach at Camp Wannatat.  Yes.  That’s right.  I TAUGHT at Camp Wannatat.  Considering what an honor I find it to be just to go, you can imagine what a thrill it was to get to teach my coin purse there.

The coin purse is not really a difficult idea or technique, but it is fiddley.  It’s hard to hold the clasp and the tatting while you’re doing joins to attach the rings to the clasp.  So the best part of the lesson was about half way through when everyone was frustrated with it and Bobbie says: “Why don’t you join it with chains?”  So I played around with it for a bit and we talked about a couple different ways to do that and after a few minutes I realized it was SOOO much easier.  Seems like such a simple idea, but it makes such a difference.  Expect a new (much easier) coin purse sometime next year…

Many other tatting things have been done over the last few weeks.  I need to take lots of pictures and do lots of posting!

I am back in San Diego now (until September 5th then I head back up to Seattle) so I’ve had a chance to finish off the hat I wrote about earlier.

To keep the tatting more compact while I was making it I strung a thread through all the rings of the first row in this edging.  To put it on the hat brim I did the same thing, but measured out the thread to fit around the hat and then tied the ends together to make a circle of tatting.

I didn’t really do much to attach it to the hat, just a quick go around with thread alternating between the hat and the tatting while trying to keep the tatting as evenly spaced as possible.  I’m not too worried about it falling off since the hat brim turns op around the edge, so I figured a quick go around would take care of it.

I’m still on the look out for a big sun hat that’s calling out for a piece of ruffled white and blue lace.  When I do find something like that I’ll just cut the thread that runs through the middle of the tatting and redo it on the new hat.

One of my first posts when I started this blog was about how pleased I was when I took my printed copies of the PDFs of the Priscilla books (available online at the Antique Pattern Library) in to have them bound.  Sure, it was just a cheap spiral comb binding, but it was so nice to have them all bound and looking like real books.  Something about the transition from a stack of papers to a bound collection made them seem like a more real collection of patterns.  Just printing them had also helped, but this furthered the feeling even more.

I love all the patterns available on the Antique Pattern Library but having them in PDF form isn’t the most easily browse-able.  It was nice to have the Priscilla books in a printed form I could curl up on a couch with or pull out of a bag to show someone what I was working on.  I downloaded to my computer and debated printing more from the Antique Pattern Library, but unless I knew it would be a book I would be working from a lot I didn’t really want more things printed.  Of course, having them sit on my computer as non-browsing-friendly PDFs means that it’ll be a long time before I get around to browsing and discovering the patterns that make printing and binding the books worthwhile.

Enter the iPad.  Oh glorious day!  I can’t tell you how excited I was to upload all the Antique Library PDFs I had on my computer to iBooks on the iPad.  It’s pretty ridiculous the joy it gives me to see the books lined up digitally in one place like this.  Don’t they just look so pretty in the picture above.  And so easy to browse.  With the old printing of the Priscilla books I’m especially enjoying being able to zoom in easily.  I like the bookmark feature, but my only complaint is that I can’t add notes to the bookmarks.  My paperbooks are covered in sticky notes that not only mark the patterns that I want to come back to, but also let me know what I was thinking of doing with the patterns.

The iPad I’m using is a friend’s old iPad 1 that I’m just borrowing to decide if I want to get one of my own.  I have to say that just for the excitement of having all my PDFs in one place it’s looking like it’s worth it.  The only problem with the iPad 1 is that it doesn’t have a camera.  I was thinking it would be awesome to be able to take pictures of the pages of other books I own so that I would always having the patterns I’m working on with me.  I could always take the pictures with my regular camera and upload them, but that’s more steps and more steps means less likely to actually happen.  :)  I suppose that’s technically against copyright laws, but it would be for personal use of books that I already own.

Didn’t mean for this to turn into a commercial for the iPad, but the whole concept of being able to browse my entire pattern library from one device is sort of blowing my mind.  Yes, that’s right.  I’m finally stepping into 2010.

My plan had been to do the second connector piece for the sample shawl over the weekend but twice I managed to mess it up badly enough that I had to cut off big chucks.  The first time I joined the piece to the wrong side of the square, but I didn’t realize it until I got to the point where I was about to start joining it to the second triangle.  So I cut off everything and started over.

The second time I got the square part right, but I shifted all the joins on the triangle side over.  Both the triangle and the square have a series of open picots on the sides that are joined to the connector, but I only need to use every other one.  Unfortunately I started off with the wrong one when connecting the triangle piece.  (Nevermind that I had done it right the first time and had that right in front of me as an example.)

What was particularly annoying was that I didn’t discover these mistakes until I’d tatted the entire length of the connector so I ended up having a lot of wasted tatting.  Oh well.  I guess that shows what a good idea it was to be making this little sample piece rather than trying it out on the actual shawl pieces.

In the interest of keeping the pain in my wrist down I haven’t been doing much tatting this week.  I’ve been REALLY wanting to pick up the shuttle and thread, but I decided that all I would allow myself to tat this week was this, the first of the two connector pieces for the shawl.  So far it looks good, though there wasn’t really any chance of this part not working.  The problems will come up when I put the next connector on and then try to do the edgings around the whole thing.

Sorry for the boring post.  Not much to report this week tatting-wise.  Just trying to keep it easy on my wrist.  I’ll probably tat up the second connector this weekend and get started on the border next week.

This weekend I tatted up the three base pieces of what I’ll use to figure out how to piece together the shawl.  At first I was finding this little piece of the project depressing because it meant about 6 hours of tatting before I would actually be able to play around with the edging ideas I’d come up with on the computer.  And then it will be hours of tatting trying out the edgings and connectors trying to find something that works before I can even START work on the actual shawl.

So I was a little disinclined to actually start tatting this.  I kept thinking “This is going to be hours and hours of tatting and in the end I’ll know how to do the edgings and the connectors on the shawl, but all I’ll actually have to show for it is a little mini-shawl.”

But I knew it was something that would have to be done to put together the big shawl so I forced myself to get the first little triangle panel tatted.  By the time I finished that I was totally over the whole pseudo-depression about having to do a whole bunch of tatting before actually being able to put together my shawl.  As soon as I had something physical in my hands I was thinking “Awesome!  When all this is done I’ll know how to do the big shawl AND I’m going to have a little mini-shawl that I can use to more easily show other tatters how great this little motif is and all the cool ways you can use different versions of it in the same piece!”

That’s always the case for me.  When designing it takes me a while to actually get started with the tatting because it’s depressing to know I’m going to end up doing a lot of tatting that doesn’t end up working, but once I actually get started and have a piece of lace I get all excited about the project again. 

So this weekend I finished off all three panels.  These are the smaller equivalents of the pieces of the big shawl.  Next step is to take my diagrammed out ideas and start tatting.  Hopefully they’ll all fit together nicely without out too much cutting and re-tatting.  🙂

I know it looks pretty much identical to the last picture I posted about this project, but now it’s actually done.  That’s the problem with a project this dense.  It took a TON of tatting to feel like I was making any progress on it.  That was fine when it was the tatting I worked on during class but when I decided to just finish it up I was thinking I only had 2 or 3 hours of tatting left on it.  Turned out to be about 3 times more than that, but it’s done now and I like the way it came out.

I strung all the rings of the first row on to a thread so I could keep them bunched up.  That made it easier to move around, but that’s also what made it feel like I was going so slow.  I only had 6 inches left, but those were bunched up inches so they were really a couple feet.  The whole thing was maybe 2 feet bunched up, and about 6 or so in reality.

The next step is a bit of light sewing to attach it to the hat.  Unfortunately, the hat is in San Diego and I’m in Seattle for another two weeks so it’ll be a while before I get to that.  I’m excited to have the tatting for the project done though.  It’s been at least 6 months since I started it.

In my last post about the shawl, I ended with the plan to play around with the pattern on the computer and see if I could come up with a way to connect all the pieces without actually picking up any shuttles or thread.  Had a flight from San Diego to Seattle on Monday (Oh… Hey Seattle people!  I’m in town till the 25th!) and had a chance to play around a bit.  It might not make sense to anyone else, but I’m going to post it anyway.  Here’s what I came up with.

There’s actually two triangle pieces and the square piece in there.  They’re connected by two stripes which are made from a doubled-over edging variation on the same pattern.  On the long side (diagonal from top left to bottom right) is another edging.  This will actually be the top part of the shawl.  On the left side is another fuller edging.  Though I didn’t add it, this edging will be repeated on the bottom part of the picture.  These two pieces are the edging around the two bottom parts of the shawl.  (This picture is 45 degrees off from the final shawl.  It was just easier to build the pieces that way.)

You might notice that the pieces that make up the three panels of the shawl are no where near as large as they are in real life.  This was done on purpose because it didn’t make sense to diagram out the whole thing when I’m only interested in the corners and the connecter pieces between the panels.  I just made smaller versions so I could more easily move them around and could see the whole thing on the screen at once (and at enough detail that it would make sense.)

So will it work?  Well… Good question.

I think it mostly will, but because my drawings aren’t as precise/even as the actual tatting will be, I won’t be totally sure how it will fit together until I try it.  I’m definitely closer to having something that works so I think playing around with it on the computer was a very good and time-saving exercise.  I’m pretty sure that this will be the basic idea but the final version will still have a bit of tweaking.  I’ll have to work out that part out with shuttles and thread.

The BIG difference between the diagram and the real thing is that this diagram COMPLETELY mis-represents the sizes of the connectors in comparison to the panels.  In the diagram, the large square is 2 motifs by 2 motifs.  In real life, it’s 8×8.  So the connectors and boarders won’t look anywhere near as large on the final version.  (I’m hoping that will also draw attention away and help to smooth out any rough edges/connections.)

In fact, when I actually get started on the final piece, I may decide that the connectors and the boarder need to be bigger.  After all, the two reasons I’m putting them there in the first place is to make the whole shawl a little bit bigger and (more importantly) to give a piece of white between the different-colored panels to make for a nicer transition between them and to have a piece of white around the piece as a whole to pull it together better.

Luckily, that’s something that can be easily adjusted later.  Once I know how the actual pieces will fit together it’s not very difficult to change the sizes.  As long as the edges of the connectors are the same I can make them pretty different from what’s currently there.

So, the next steps?

Well, next I have tat what’s on the diagram.  I don’t want to try it on the actual piece, partly because I don’t want to stretch out picots by joining something I may take off (and if I’m going to have to cut away what I’m tatting now, I don’t want to end up accidentally cutting the actual piece.)

Mostly though, I just don’t want to have to that much for a trial run.  It’ll be better to try it out on a smaller piece.  If the corners aren’t going to work together the way I think they are, I don’t want to have tatted up a foot and a half of the edging just to get from one corner to another.

So now I put aside the three panels I have finished.  Pull out some size 10 thread (the actual piece is in size 20) and tat up three new much smaller panels.  I’ll play around with the edgings and connectors on these pieces and will hopefully get something that works.  Stay tuned!