Launching Tatting Times Online

 

Tatting Times online

                It was a good run, I think.  Thirty years.  I began Tatting Times in 1992, when I was an editor at a daily newspaper and tatting was what made me secretly happy and kept me sane.  Many of the first subscribers to Tatting Times were really glad to learn they were not the last living tatters in the universe keeping a dying art on life support. 

                Since that time, several thousand more across the globe who believed they alone stood against the extinction of tatting met through the magic of the internet. 

In 1992, it cost 24 cents to mail each issue.  I was younger, married, mother to a teenage daughter.  Quite a lot happened to all of us in the intervening years.  If you were a subscriber but not a close friend, you won’t have known that for me these included a variety of orthopedic issues followed, not coincidentally, by what I experienced as a devastating divorce.  Surprisingly, a year later I met a lovely man with a sweet temperament and serious health issues; and 20 years later, this past February, he died.   I’ve written none of this in Tatting Times.  It’s back-story, about me, not about tatting…  though through good times and bad, tatting has always (literally) been with me.

Fast forward to now, when many talented tatting designers whose beautiful work is made accessible for free or a small fee on the internet.  Postage for the final issue of Tatting Times was 78 cents per copy to US subscribers.  The cost of mailing overseas copies would make anyone shudder.   I decided to share tatting on this blog instead, along with book/thread/product information, news of events, new techniques and of course, my own new designs.  I begin with the one promised in the final issue of Tatting Times.

 Please note, as with other designs shared online, although they’re not in print, they are still under copyright.  That means you should not, no matter whether you live in the U.S.A. or elsewhere, share anyone’s pattern without attribution AND permission, nor make a few changes and call it your own design.  This finicky legality seems to be understood by most, but alas, not all tatters, as I’ve learned to my dismay.  Want to teach one of these designs to your own small tatting group in your own hometown?  Please ask.  The answer is most likely yes, I’m honored, but I’d still like to be asked first, in the same way one prefers to invite guests to tea rather than have them barge in and help themselves to all the cookies.  Want this taught at a larger gathering?  Ask me, I'm portable!

You can generally reach me at threads@empireaccess.net.  I'm still a writer and editor, so when deadlines loom, it could take a few days for me to respond, but I promise I will.

 

The Wellsboro Star

Beads are your choice, as is the size of thread.  The larger star – the teal green one – was a less successful one because the stitch count had not yet been refined.  It used size 8 beads on size 10 thread.  The smaller star, in tatting cotton with size 15 beads, needed only a little blocking and pressing to lie flat.  Wind two shuttles CTM.  The “ball thread” shuttle will have a little more thread and all 25 beads.

Begin by dropping a loop to begin a mock ring

CH: 8

                With ball thread shuttle, R: 8-8

CH: 5

                With 4 Bs on ball thread shuttle, R: 5 BB 2 BB 5

***CH: 5

                R: 8-8

CH: 8, post working shuttle through loop and close mock ring.

RW.  CH: 10

Drop loop to begin mock R, CH: 8-2

                With ball 3 shuttle and 3 Bs in loop, R: 2+10 BBB 10-2.

Finish mock ring, CH:  2-6, post working shuttle through loop and close mock R

CH: 8

With ball thread shuttle, R: 6+ 4+8

CH: 10

Drop loop to begin mock R: CH: 8+ (to previous small R) 5

With 2 Bs on ball thread shuttle, R: 5 + 2 BB 5

Repeat from *** for five star points.  Note the last R in the very center has no Bs but joins to the small Rs on either side, and the large mock ring in the center joins to the smaller Rs on either side as shown.