Out of hiatus for a while

Not much tatting done due to other commitments but I am popping out from the tatting hiatus for this announcement.

My three tatting books can now be ordered from these three online stores:

Roseground

Tatting Corner

Handy Hands

Tatters in the respective regions should be able to get the books much quicker now.  It does take a while if they are mailed out from Malaysia.

I had not been tatting seriously for over a month, but I did try something different - tatting with satin cords

This is the largest/thickest kind of thread/yarn/cord that I have ever used for tatting.  The cord is the type usually used for making chinese knots and is about 3mm thick/wide. Because of the thickness of the cord, I hand-tatted this rosette.

The centre of the rosette is an actual tatted ring hand-tatted with the direct-tatting method as explained in the book The Complete Book of Tatting by Rebecca Jones.  Once I get into rhythm, it was not difficult to do direct-tatting, though a bit slow for me who is used to the sliding method with shuttles.  But, for someone who is struggling with the flip in shuttle-tatting, this could be a solution.  And, in direct-tatting, you can choose not to use a shuttle at all, since a shuttle is merely a thread carrier.

The chains in the outer rounds of the rosette are not worked like a standard tatted chains.  I placed a round of bare thread over the centre ring, joining the thread at each picot of the ring and back to the beginning.  The double-stitches are then added over the bare thread using the Dora Young knots used as in making split chains.

By doing it that way, I can start from the beginning of the cord and not somewhere in the middle like you usually need to when tatting chains - if you get what I am trying to say.

This video by Karen Cabrera shows how the double stitches are made over the bare thread.  It is also the method I used to wrap stitches over a cabone ring.