Donna's Tatting blog

I finally finished making two crosses using Rachel's pattern for her Easy Cross (found under patterns).
Sorry the image isn't the best. I used my iPhone since I can't find the battery charger for my camera. One of the crosses is cut off but if you look in my album it's not cut off there.

I am making these for friends and I think they will love them. So as I was working on the pink one it suddenly occurred to me that I could make one using two different colors. I know this is probably going to make you all say "yeah duh" but I didn't realize until I was trying to figure out how to hide my cut ends. I still don't really know how to do that but I noticed when I tried holding the cut end with the other thread when making a stitch that when the stitch flipped the stitch was made with the double strings. I've always used the ball end to make chains. So it occurred to me that if the ball thread was a different color the stitch would be that color and the shuttle thread would be the core thread and it's opposite for the rings. So I started with the two shuttles that had pink and purple on them and tied the ends together and wah-la! how cool is that?! I guess it must seem silly but I did learn from the internet and didn't see that anywhere.

Another thing I figured out by accident was hand-tatting. I have read where other people have said they hand-tatted a part of a pattern because it was hard to pass the shuttle though and I always wondered how the heck do you do that. Well I ran out of thread on my shuttle and wanted to finish my ring so I grabbed the end of the string and just did it without really thinking about what I was doing. I guess I just did it as if I had a shuttle in my hand. After I finished the ring I thought, "hold up, I just hand-tatted!!!!!!!!" So then I grabbed a ball of crochet cotton worsted weight for making washcloths and wound a little bit into a bundle and started tatting and I made this simple little flower maybe two inches across. Then I took a crochet hook and started crocheting a circle around it. I stopped when I had no idea what I could do with it though. Maybe I'll think of something.

It's fun learning new things. I feel like a big-girl tatter now! I need some pull-ups