Small Mat

I've been seeing fewer complaints on the Etsy forums about payment processing issues, so I think it's mostly been fixed (though the occasional issue pops up now and again).

A few days ago, I finished this small mat in DMC size 80 thread. This is a continuation of the triangles theme that I have been blogging about (see my previous post for more). This mat could be made much larger, but I just wanted a sample to place into my tatting binder. Here it is with an antique rubber tatting shuttle for scale:

Before I begin designing, I always need a visual reference. For this mat, I needed to find a pathway that would allow me to complete it in one pass and maintain symmetry on both sides. Using my iPad, I began by taking a photo of the small strip of triangles from my previous blog post:

I used an app called PhotoGrid to make a rough "collage" of the tatting, and another app called You Doodle to draw around the edges and polish up the shape of the mat. Here is the resulting image:

From here I continued using the You Doodle app to draw a path through the maze of triangles:

This maze was a little more tricky than normal, as I wanted to maintain symmetry on both sides of the mat and complete it in one pass. If I didn't care about symmetry, I could have simply snaked back and forth, back and forth.

I experimented more with the above pathway, and found that it can be repeated indefinitely. So, if you have a lot of patience, you could make an entire tablecloth this way, only stopping to reload your shuttles when you run out of thread:

On another note, for those who remember the stray cat from my previous post, here is Mama Cat with her four kittens:

They are getting a lot bigger now. Right after I snapped this photo, the black kitten saw me and got really spooked. So I've been trying to leave them alone :)