More knotted lace

This is the latest little knotted lace motif I made. My book has 7 patterns for motifs and it looks like I am slowly making my way through them for practice. I am not going in order though. Two of the motifs are shown in this post. They are motifs no. 1 (blue) and 4 (ecru).

The one I just finished was motif no. 2. I think *slooooowly* the tension is getting better. The last two motifs did not have any of the "more advanced" stitches though - like closed loops and bows. Those might prove to be more problematic simply due to a lack of practice.

The biggest problem with this motif was that I wasn't actually paying attention to the directions, so I messed up on all the bridging loops and carry-up loops and what not. Sigh, more things to pay attention to...

I am slightly more optimistic about actually being able to make this lace look pretty!

Worked with DMC Cebelia no. 30 in ecru.

Love in a mist - finally!

I finally completed one of my very long-term WIPs.

I started this particular project a looooong time ago - maybe in 2000 or 2001. I made the center rosette and got probably 6 or so flowers of the next round. Then, when I was closing one of the rings the thread snapped. At that time I was still more or less a beginner tatter and I didn't know how to go about adding more thread so it would still look nice. Since the center rosette didn't look too nice, I decided to start from the very beginning. I kind of like the center pattern, so I am holding on to the almost-finished-center. Have no idea if I will ever do anything with it though!

A few years later I picked it up again. The second time around, I made a very beautiful center rosette - all the chains lay right next to each other with no space between them. I also managed not to snap any threads while working the flowers that go around the center. But.... right after I closed the last ring of the last flower, I realized that I omitted a picot. At first I decided to continue and somehow make up for it in a later round (with the mignonette tatting). I continued and finished the center. That missing picot really bothered me and I was afraid that it just would not look right if I somehow tried to add a ring in the next round. And so, I decided that since I really like the pattern, that I might as well start over. Again.

Third time must be the charm, right? I started for the third time soon after I finished the second attempt. I got as far as making the 8 rings for the center rosette and then put it down for a few years. Last spring I picked it up again. The rosette actually didn't turn our as nicely as the one in the second attempt, and I was afraid it would bowl once I made the round of flowers. I decided to go on - I really didn't feel like cutting out the chains and redoing them. I wanted this pattern done and I was afraid that if I did any cutting out/restarting I would end up putting it away for a few more years. Luckily it didn't bowl once the flower round was complete. If it had, I don't know that I would have been able to start for the 4th time! The mignonette tatting went very quickly. I had only dabbled in mignonette once before, and even that was a few years ago. Initially I had planned on doing each round individually, but when I saw how ugly the join was at the beginning of the first round, I decided to use split rings. It looks much nicer that way, and even though I don't really mind working in the ends, it was nice not to have to do it after every round. It made the rounds go by much faster.

I still like the pattern and I think it was worth starting 3 times to finally get it done! I think I might have preferred a more substantial outer border though, although I guess that would defy the whole "mist" purpose. It really is a lovely pattern as is, as are most of Mary Konior's patterns. I'm not sure what to do with it now. It's almost too pretty to put in a box and only pull it out occasionally to look at, but since I have dark furniture, I cannot even put it on an end table to show off. That's actually a problem for me - I like working with black thread, but it automatically renders the item kind of useless! I personally don't like to frame things for display either.

Pattern from "Tatting Patterns" by Mary Konior, made with DMC Special Dentelles no. 80 in black.

Hope everyone had a nice Thanksgiving!

Mediterranean Knotted Lace

I don't remember when I first encountered this lace, but about 2 years ago I got the book Mediterranean Knotted Lace by Elene Dickson and I immediately tried my hand at knotted lace. I quickly realized that although the basic knot was really easy, maintaining some sort of regular tension was most definitely not easy! To make matters worse, I used a really horrible poor quality crochet thread (no. 10) which made things harder than they should be.

That first winter, I learned the basic knots and then quickly moved to trying little motifs. It's a lot more fun to practice when you actually end up making a cute little motif than when you are just working on an endless edging! When I started the motif, I switched to DMC Cebelia No. 10, which made things much easier. The thread no longer pilled which helped a bit. As you can see, the tension is still all over the place, but at least it is starting to look like something! (Well, maybe not, but please humor me...)

As you can see it ruffles - a lot! I tried telling myself it's supposed to ruffle, but I'm not really buying it:)

In order to get more practice keeping my tension even, I decided to practice just rows of the basic loops. Well, that got boring, so I added a tiny edging at the top (see below). As you can see, the tension is better, but still needs lots of help! I then made a longer stretch of edging, but got bored about halfway through (not shown). I now use it as a bookmark:) With all of these I had also switched to smaller thread, using DMC Cebelia 30.

Since the edgings were not getting me very far - too boring - I went back to making a little motif. This one turned out much better than the previous one! The tension is still quite off though. I think it would really help if I saw a real-life version of the lace as opposed to just the few pictures in my book. I have a hard time gauging the relative sizes of the basic loops and small loops and large loops etc. Hopefully it will come with practice. I think it will also look better when I move to even tinier thread. For the time being, I will continue to practice using size 30.

(Don't mid the ends in the last picture. I didn't realize they weren't worked in until after I scanned it and I was too lazy to pull out the scanner again.)

Unfortunately I think I've regressed. After finishing the motif shown above, I put knotted lace aside for a few months. I recently started another little medallion and it's quite horrible. I'm thinking that for the time being, I should work at a more constant pace and not ignore it for months on end. Slow and steady should be my motto - a little every week or so.

Teneriffe - take two

I had so much fun making the first Teneriffe motif that I had to make a second one!

I used the exact same knots/interlacing as in the first one, the only difference being the order in which I did them in. I decided to go in order and did the two rounds of knots, the round of interlacing and then the last two rounds. The interlacing looks better, but the two outer rounds of knots aren't as neat as in the first motif.

Looks like more practice is needed!

The funny thing about this motif is that I had *just* enough thread to finish. I literally had ~2in left over when I was done. It was hard making the last knot. I'm glad I didn't have to add in more thread at the very end though. I am not too sure how to do that!

Teneriffe

I've been interested on and off in teneriffe lace for a while now. I thought it looked cool and looked fun to make, but I didn't go out and bought a book either. A while back I realized that Alexandra Stillwell was generous enough to allowe her book The Technique of Teneriffe Lace to be posted on the Arizona lace website. I downloaded the book, flipped through it for a while and decided to take the plunge. (For those of you that aren't familiar with the Arizona website, it's fantastic! It's mostly bobbin lace, but there are some other laces as well. A wonderful resource of old lace publications/books.)

Here is my first little motif. The instructions are pretty clear and for the most part easy to follow. The lace is fun to make too! It works quickly, especially this first pattern which does not have anything too complicated.

There is supposed to be a round of interlacing in there, but it looks absolutely horrible in my sample. I think the problem was the base I had decided to use to stretch the web. I found an old cork thing, which I thought would be good. In retrospect, it was probably a bad idea. First of all, getting the pins into the cork was a bit difficult to say the least. I thought my needle lace pillow was bad, but that was a piece of cake compared to the cork! I literally had to pound the pins in with a hammer. Now I like playing with tools and all, but somehow I don't think a hammer is normally part of lace making equipment:) Needless to say there was absolutely no flexibility once the web was stretched. It worked well for the rounds of knots, but when it came time to do the interlacing, I just couldn't do it. There wasn't enough give between the pairs of threads. (I know how to do interlacing - I did some when I went through my drawn-thread embroidery phase, so I know it wasn't me.) I snapped my thread twice trying to get the pairs to interlace properly - quite a feat when working with size 20 thread! If I remake the motif, I will see if I can leave some slack when stretching the web.

When I pulled out the pins to remove the motif from the background, I had to use needle pliers. That doesn't sound right either...

Other than that, I am pleased with my first sample of teneriffe lace. It's not the prettiest thing in the world, and I need to work on the tension, but it was fun to make. I need to come up with a better "pillow" or some other background, because I don't think the cork is cutting it. I don't really want to stretch it out on fabric though. All in all though, I am definitely looking forward to making more teneriffe lace.

And no, I haven't done enough reading to really know the difference between teneriffe/sol/nanduti laces. Since the book I am using is called Technique of Teneriffe, that's what I will be calling my lace.

Needle Lace Pillow

Blogger and Safari do not always get along. Oh well.

I made this little pillow for my needle lace a few months ago. I used a pool noodle for the base, then wrapped several layers of a water-absorbent pad around it. In retrospect it was pointless to use the pool noodle base, because by the time I got the pillow to the diameter I wanted it to be, I had wrapped so many layers of the padding around it that the pins no longer even reach the pool noodle. The layers of padding are kept in place with a few pins. I then wrapped a cloth napkin around the whole thing. Looks good, right. I though so too, until.... I tried to pin the cloth napkin around it. I had tried pushing a pin through a layer of padding before using it with no problems. Pushing a pin through several layers of padding is a whole different story though. I need to practically hammer in the pins! Not good. Luckily I have no intentions of using this for bobbin lace. At least with needle lace, once the pattern is pinned in place, I don't have to keep adding pins to it.

I am not really sure what possessed me to make a needle lace pillow, since I tend to hold things in my hands. I dabble in cross stitch and embroidery on occasion and I always hold the work in my hands. I've tried a frame and it was waaaay too awkward. The first few beginner's pieces of needle lace that I have done so far have also been done in my hands. However, I decided to try and attach the pattern to heavy paper as opposed to using a cloth backing (which I had done in the past). Once I did that, I could no longer maneuver the pattern and fold it over onto itself, which made it hard to hold. That's when my pillow came in very handy!

I know the "proper" way of making needle lace is to attach the pattern to cloth and then work the lace, however I find that laying the cordonnet takes me forever to do it that way. For some reason it is much faster to work on heavy paper. It probably has something to do with the fact that I am totally inept with a needle in my hands. I'm not sure which way I prefer to work. I will try it both ways for a while until I find the way that is best for me.

Like I said, this pillow is not exactly the perfect solution. One of these days I need to either find a wool blanket or get some felt somewhere to replace the padding I used. I would also prefer an even larger diameter. It goes without saying that it would be nice not to have to pound the pins into my pillow with the handles of my kitchen scissors:)

Motif No. 21

This is Snowflake 11 from 24 Snowflakes in Tatting. It was a fun pattern to make - until I got to the end. The pattern is very pretty , but when I came to the last repeat, I realized that it would bowl severely. My camera is broken so I cannot show just how badly it bowls. Too bad.

The snowflake was made using 1 thread of a DMC metallic skein. It was an absolute dream to work with! Easy to split, easy to tat with and of course, a lovely, lovely color!

Geometry

Yeah, I like math once you get past numbers. Arithmetic was never my thing though. Symbols are way better than actual numbers! My favorite classes were geometry, calculus and differential equations. Just don't ask me to do anything anymore. I probably couldn't solve an integral to save my life. Too bad.

Here is some basic geometry:

circumference = 2πr

therefore circumference is directly proportional to radius

What does this have to do with lace? Quite a bit, actually. I am working on a tatted doily with two rounds of rings and chains. In this case, the rings face inward and are connected to each other and thus determine the size of the radius. The chains leave more wiggle room. The doily I am working on has the exact size rings and chains for 2 rounds! I'm not about to drive why that wouldn't work but I think if anyone thinks about it, it becomes quite obvious that something needs to change!

The way I saw it, I had three choices:

a) tat the first round really tightly and the second one loosely

-that would not work on so many levels, I don't want to go into too much detail. Suffice to say that unless I *need* to tat loosely (like with metallic thread reminding me constantly), I will tat tightly.

b) change the stitch count

-too much work. I don't want to fool around and hope that the two rounds will be OK. I will cut out a mistake, but I will not cut out a whole round.

c) do not connect the rings in the second round

-that's the option I chose. This way, the circumference of the second round can be larger and thus prevent bowling.

If you take a closer look at the picture you will see the problem. You can see that the picots barely touch. If I had connected the rings, there would have been severe bowling.

In most cases bowling is due to different tension/picot size etc. However, in this case I suspect the doily is doomed to bowling no matter what (if you follow the pattern exactly as written). Again, I could probably come up with some mathematical explanation, but it's probably unnecessary:) The exact same stitch count across two rounds will not give you a nice radial rings. It will give you two strips of the same size. I had to read over the pattern several times to realize that indeed, the two rounds are identical. This is why it pays to read the directions and think about them a bit before blindly starting. (Although I have to admit I usually blindly start tatting...)

This is my "big" project now. Not for its size (although it is, or rather will be big), but because it's mu current focus.

It's Friday! Hope everyone has a nice weekend. Looks like the weather will be perfect to rake:)

Sneak Preview

A sneak preview of one of the projects I started recently. It will probably be a while before I finish it though. Despite my best intentions of trying to get through my WIPs, it seems like I start projects quicker than I finish them! I am back to focusing on only a few as opposed to trying to work on 10+ projects at a time. Let's see how long that lasts!

Halloween was a blast! I had forgotten how much fun it is to dress up. Unfortunately our camera acted up so I will have to bug my friends for pictures from the party.