I'm going to introduce two changes at once here, but one of the novelties is a combination of tricks you've already studied, and I figure you've already got more copies of this medallion than you want.
The medallion will be made entirely of the ball thread, with small points of the shuttle thread showing. Choose your colors accordingly. You need twelve beads. Thread fourteen beads onto the ball; it's better to have two left over than to come up one short. It will be necessary now and again to push the beads farther back onto the ball. (If they fit the thread loosely, and if the ball is below the work, they may slide back by themselves.)
Begin by making a chain of eight doubles with a link picot in the middle.
C: 4-4
Swap reverse as you were taught in the ninth exercise Because you are working the chain on the wrong side (for the sake of all those joins in the quatrefoils), the extra half-stitch is a purl and the mock ring that is coming up will begin with a plain and be worked on the right side. Drop a marker on the shuttle thread, then work
C: 4-4---4-4
This chain should be worked exactly the way you have been working the rings that form the inverted rosette at the center of the medallion; the elongated picot should be the same length that you have been using. (Note: if the picot is smaller, the rings will be more diamond-shaped; if it is larger, they will be rounder. If it is too large, bare thread will show between the rings.)
Pull the shuttle thread to tighten the "ring," then make a one-thread join at the marker. You may pause partway through this join to tighten the ring again. Swap reverse again; this time the extra half-stitch will be a plain and the chain will begin with a purl and be worked on the wrong side.
Proceed to make a chain and a quatrefoil by one of the three methods you learned in Exercise Ten and Exercise Eleven. It doesn't matter which method of joining you choose, but you must use the same one through the whole piece.
There is one difference: instead of making ornamental picots on the two middle rings of the quatrefoils, slide up one of the beads from the ball snug against the just-completed stitch, then make the next stitch as close to the previous stitch as you can. You want the picot being made to be as tight around the bead as possible, so that it won't flop. (In some other pattern, you might want the bead to swing at the end of a long picot.)
If I indicate places where beads are to be placed by "=", the repeat may be written:
MR: 4+4+4-4 swap reverse (part of the inverted rosette)
C: 4-4
MR: 4+4+4-4 (join to the chain, then to the previous quatrefoil)
MR: 4+4=4-4 (replace middle picot with bead)
MR: 4+4=4-4 (replace middle picot with bead)
MR: 4+4-4-4
C: 4+4 swap reverse
There will be no "C: 4+4" at the end of the last repeat, because you began with this chain. Join the last quatrefoil to the first quatrefoil and to the first chain; tie off.
You can put as many beads as you like into your work, but all must be threaded before work begins -- unless you fancy unwinding the entire ball to thread them from the other end!
You can also place beads around the edges of a ring, but I don't enjoy waving a bead-laden shuttle about. Beads to be worked into a ring must be slid off the shuttle onto the ring before the first stitch is made; Until they are needed, keep them on the idle thread that runs from your little finger to your thumb.
If the hole in a bead is large enough to pass a crochet hook, you can join into the bead as if it were a picot. This lets you put beads on rings without having them on your shuttle. I'd call joining the only way to add beads when several colors are to be arranged in a complicated pattern; it's difficult to string a large number of beads without making one single error.
If the bead isn't large enough for a hook, you can join into it with the aid of fine sewing thread, a needle threader, and determination. Poke the threader through the bead, hang a piece of sewing thread over your tatting thread, put the double ends of the sewing thread through the threader, use the threader to draw the sewing thread through the bead, then use the sewing thread to draw the tatting thread through. (You may be able to poke the fine thread through without a threader.) Pass the shuttle through the loop and complete the join as usual.
If a bead is wanted between two rings or chains, make a joining picot a little longer than the width of the bead. Before joining to the picot, pull the picot through the bead, using a crochet hook or the trick described above. A straight pin through the picot will hold the bead while you are picking up your tatting.
Jane Eboral has devised a variant of joining to
beads that allows one to make a flat picot with several beads
strung on it:
Avoiding Loading Beads onto a Shuttle or Chain
Thread
Note that a similar technique allows one to make a
doubled-thread picot.
(I hear that the simple join, rather than the special
join used to keep beads from twisting, is used for
this purpose. Determining the best join for making
double picots is left as an exercise for the reader
— I have no interest in doubled picots, and the
right answer is different in different situations.)
Note also that you can make a long picot, make a few
stitches, then join to the end of the long picot to
make a picot that spans over the stitches. This
technique also allows you to make picots that overlap:
just start a second spanning picot before completing
the first one.
Don't limit yourself to needlework shops and craft stores when looking for beads. Leather workers use ceramic and wooden beads, fishermen use large glass beads and luminescent plastic beads, and sparklers intended for costume jewelry sometimes have holes in them. There are many bangles and dangles other than beads, and things not intended for decoration sometimes have interesting shapes and colors. Be careful what sort of decorations you add to things that might get dirty: wooden beads ought not to be soaked in water, plastic beads sometimes get scratched and dull in the wash, and the silver inside some glass beads isn't always waterproof. Some things that are safe in the wash will dissolve in dry-cleaning fluid.
The swap reverse will enable you to substitute a mock ring for a real ring in any shuttle-and-ball pattern, and also allow you to substitute real rings for mock rings, as you did in exercise eight. This gives you a great deal of control over where the colors of your shuttle and ball appear; the only thing you can't do is to make a chain in the shuttle color.
We'll explain how to do that in the next exercise.
On to Exercise Thirteen:
»
«
Back to Exercise Eleven
«
Back to Table of Contents