Software Assisted Pattern Adaptations

When it comes to tatting, I am an absolute visual learner. I can follow diagrams with ease, but give me a written pattern and I don't know how to make heads or tails of it.

It naturally follows that to adapt a pattern, I need some kind of visual reference. Any computer program that has copy, paste, crop, resize, and rotate will do (though I tend to use various Apps on my iPad, because my laptop is usually tucked away in a closet.)

The Priscilla bookmark, for example, started as an edging from the Priscilla Tatting Book #2:

I wanted to see how the pattern would look if I turned it the other way around, so I took a photo of the pattern and cropped it:

I used two copies of the photo, making sure to rotate one of them so I could splice them together:

This gave me a basic idea of how the bookmark would look, though it still needed a corner. To do so, I used a third copy of the image and spliced it onto the end:

I tried pulling the corner out a little more, but found that it looked best as it is pictured above.

Figuring out the stitch count for the corner required only minor adjustments to the chains. However, as is the case with many vintage patterns, this one needed a bit of tweaking to get it to lay flat. I tatted a small sample to test out the corner and to adjust the stitch count:

From this, the final pattern was constructed:

At the beginning of the year, mb duke made a blog post and asked if the bookmark pattern could be converted into a cross. I believe the answer is yes, and that it would be fairly easy to do. Using the same concepts above, I can splice four images of the bookmark together to create a cross:

A bit of adaptation is needed to get the pattern to flow continuously, so I used an App on my iPad to draw over the center portion in white. I also began to draw connecting chains:

From this point, one can add their own ideas of how to stabilize the central part of the cross. I chose floating rings, which I drew on my iPad (please excuse the poor drawing quality!)

I don't have a finished version of this, but I am really confident that the idea would work. All that is needed is to estimate the stitch counts for the inner chains and floating rings. The rest of the stitch counts are already provided in the bookmark pattern itself. This is something that I have added to my ever growing "To Do" list, and if I ever complete it, I will add it to the free patterns section of my blog.