I suppose the most artistly way to design is to work out a design on paper and then copy it with a shuttle. This method has never sounded like fun to me, so I dismiss it as untatterly: lines that look good when drawn on paper don't necessarily look good when tatted in the air. Besides, if you aren't careful about the order in which you tat your lines, you could find yourself trying to work in a space smaller than your hands, or otherwise make trouble for yourself.
One thing I have done is to put rubbings of actual tatting under tracing paper and copy them in new combinations so that I could see how they fit together before tatting them. A modern version of this technique would be to photocopy diagrams of rings, clovers, chains, etc., then cut them out and arrange them with re-positionable adhesive.
When I worked on paper, I used a pen that made a line about as wide as the tatted chain and drew simplified pictures of the rings and chains. I didn't bother to represent joins and picots because I knew where they were. I got away with this because I never preserved a diagram, and often discarded it before beginning to tat.
When you make up a symbol, jot down its meaning on the margin of your diagram. If you don't draw your diagram so that it would be intelligible to a stranger, there is no use in keeping it; by the time you want to refer to it again, you'll be a stranger to the person who drew it.
To draw an official diagram, represent chains and rings by a bold line about as wide as the thread, drawn to indicate the path of the thread core over which the knots are tied. Use thin dashes to represent picots and two-thread joins. You don't need a symbol for the one-thread join; just show the kink produced by the join near-missing the point where it attaches. (It's more usual to draw the join as an intersection of lines, but I find it difficult to read the diagram without a little gap to keep me from following the wrong line.)
Dots along the outside of the curve represent the purls of individual stitches. To keep the diagram from being confusing (and to save yourself many boring hours of making little dots), leave the purl-dots off all except one representative example of each ring and chain, or only one segment of one example, if the picots are spaced equally. Do not get industrious and draw all the dots in! If no more than are necessary are drawn, you can count them once, then know that all the others are the same. If you have to count all the dots on every segment of every ring and chain, the diagram will be tedious to read, and it won't be obvious where the repeats and changes are.
If the diagram is accompanied by instructions, you don't need any dots, just an arrow showing where the instructions start.
In the Tenth exercise, I remarked that any pattern that can be drawn without lifting the pen from the paper can be tatted. By now you should be able to see why it is only no-lifting-the-pen designs that are possible: the two threads are continuous, so the line they follow has to be continuous. There are a few tricks to evade this limitation.
The most obvious: tie off and start over elsewhere. This trick is used more in tatting than in other forms of lacemaking, because there is a smaller penalty for cutting the thread. Indeed, designs are often cut into rounds or motifs when they can be drawn without lifting the pencil.
You can go over a line twice by passing the thread behind (Third Exercise). I used this trick in one version of the Classic Wheel in the Sixth Exercise.
In shuttle-and-ball patterns, you have to consider how the two threads are going to get back together again, so passing the thread behind is used mostly to avoid bare threads in single-shuttle designs. It might have some interesting possibilities in two-shuttle designs.
The "split ring" carries both threads of a two-shuttle or shuttle-and-ball pattern from one end of a ring to the other.
You can produce an "odd vertex," as mathematicians call the place where the pencil has to leave the paper, by not cutting the thread off the ball after winding the shuttle. (This is called "working on a continuous thread".) By this means, a chain can start in mid-air, with a finished end. If you plan to join to the exposed end later, you must put a marker over the thread to prevent it from pulling entirely inside the chain. If you want a picot at the beginning of the chain, work a one-plain ring (i.e. tie an overhand knot in the thread) before beginning the chain. If you begin with an odd vertex, the place where you tie off will also be the meeting place of an odd number of lines. (Because every line has two ends, every design has an even number of odd vertices.)
Wind a shuttle without cutting off from the ball. Make a short chain (or a long one if it suits your fancy). If there is a loop of thread at the beginning of the chain, draw it in as you would draw a ring, adjusting the curve of the stem in the process. Make a clover of five or six rings -- keep making rings until it looks like a flower to you -- and tie the shuttle thread to the ball thread to draw the end of the last ring to the beginning of the clover.
You can make a rosette instead of the clover. In this case, the flower will overlap the stem.
If you wind both ends of the thread onto shuttles, you can decorate the stem with a leaf on the way up.
A swap reverse or a change of shuttles will impart an S curve to the stem, and allow leaves to be on opposite sides of the stem. Leaf-rings must be made with the thread currently serving as the ball thread, so that an uninterrupted core thread can impart a smooth curve to the stem.
You can begin the chain with a two- or three-ds ring to provide a fat end to the chain like the swelling at the base of some stems.
If you make the design to appliqué onto cloth, a very small picot at the beginning of the chain will give you something to sew the end of the stem down by.
A tedious, but fertile, way to create dead ends and odd vertices is to work a "false chain." Use the shuttle like a needle to embroider "up-and-down buttonhole" over a bare thread left for that purpose. (See "False Chain," Encyclopedic Index.) If there is more than one end at the odd vertex, the false chain must be made first, unless the shuttle is thin enough to fit through the hole being created. Nicholls uses false chains to create a clever seven-branched candlestick, and presents a bunch of grapes created by Riego. False chains are more appropriate in pictures and appliqués than in free-standing lace.
A chain that's tatting at one end and false tatting at the other is called a "split chain". Split chains and rings are sometimes used to climb from one round to the next without cutting the threads.
There are three ways to produce a tatted fabric:
1. Work independent medallions which are joined together at the edges. With different names for the bits that are assembled, and various methods of joining, this method of design is used in every form of needlework.
2. Work a medallion, then work successive rounds of edging onto it. It is also possible to work a spiral, but spirals don't work as well in tatting as in knitting and crochet. (Inspiration: design a snail or nautilus.)
3. Let the two threads or an edging wander over the shape in some pattern. In a piece with radial symmetry, for example, the line of tatting would probably proceed from the center to the edge of the piece and back again. Squares and rectangles can be made by working straight rows. Butterfly wings are often made by putting a chain around the border of the wing while rings decorate the interior and hold the chain in position.
Methods can be combined: the medallions of which a piece is composed may be worked in rounds; an edging worked by method 3 may hook onto medallions at intervals. A composition of medallions may have a border worked in rounds, and a piece worked in rounds may have a border of medallions.
Sometimes a design conceived by one method can be worked by another. For example, I wanted to make a doily of seven medallions. Instead of working the medallions separately, I worked one of the outer medallions, then one sixth of the center medallion, which brought me to the right place to work another edge medallion. The structure was like that of the rosette of rosettes, with larger medallions replacing the rosettes.
In bobbin lace and needle lace, a common method of design is to work isolated motifs and then work background stitches between them. Since tatting lacks a background stitch, the equivalent method is to appliqué tatted motifs onto fine cotton or linen net. This method of assembling tatting merges gradually into decorating net with tatting. I'd say the dividing line is the way you finish the edges: if the edge is finished by sewing down an edging, then working a second edging into the first, with each join made both into the picots of the first edge and through the edge of the net, then you've got tatting assembled on net. If the net is hemmed, you've got net with tatting.
If you ever tat anything really big, such as a wedding dress, I'd recommend the net method -- not just because you can economize on time spent tatting, but because large plain areas allow your design to be appreciated from a distance great enough to take in the whole object at once.
Most medallions are curled-up edgings. The edgings have to be worked around something. The something is usually a ring, a space, or a picot. The classic wheel and the daisy are worked around rings. The rosette is the only medallion we have studied that is worked around a space, but any edging can be worked around an open space. The rosette of rosettes on which we spent so much time is worked around a picot. Note that the picot in the rosette of rosettes is as large as the space in the rosette; the rosette is curled so tightly that the space it surrounds is smaller than the rings it is made of. If you were to work a stitch or two of chain between the rings, the space would open up and be more obvious. It would also take more rings to surround the space.
Radial symmetry is very common in needlework. This is partly because we find radial symmetry pleasing, and partly because it is easy to produce it by working in rounds, or by repeating a wedge-shaped motif.
Any squiggle becomes a pattern if you repeat it symmetrically, as we demonstrated by making cut-paper "snowflakes" as children. But remember that you got better snowflakes when you started planning your cuts.
To let an edging wander over a shape, you'll have to figure out how to turn and curve it. It shouldn't be too difficult if you remember that distances around the inside of a curve are shorter than distances around the outside of a curve, so on the inside, you want to use shorter chains and fewer rings; on the outside, you want to use longer chains and put in extra rings.
The trefoil turns through almost exactly a right angle. To make a row of rings turn a sharp corner, replace one of them with a trefoil. If you want the outside of the corner to be square, make the middle ring a bit longer than the other two.
If a curved edging is too full around the outside, you can usually persuade it to lie flat by squashing the rings into ovals and making the chains curve more sharply. If it's too skimpy, tatting doesn't stretch worth a nickel -- and squashing on the inside of a curve isn't nearly as easy as squashing on the outside of the curve.
On to School is Out:
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