When I design a piece of tatting, I almost always need to work from a visual reference. I can kind of picture designs in my head, but the ideas are fuzzy, so I draw them on my iPad. For the past few years, I have been using an app called Amaziograph to brainstorm tatting designs. It works best for things that are symmetrical, such as doilies, snowflakes, and squares.
Here is my latest project, a small doily. The first photo shows the doily at about the halfway point. It is tatted in Lizbeth size 40 thread in white, and the Amaziograph drawing can be seen in black on my iPad:
I was worried about the outer chains because they are so long, but was able to get them to work by using balanced double stitches. Here is the finished doily next to the iPad:
Even though I have the drawing, stitch counts are still figured out the old fashioned way: through trial and error and past experiences. Stitch counts get a lot easier to calculate after years of practice. I've built up a kind of mental knowledge base and can get fairly good starting numbers just by looking at a drawing.
There's still a lot of work to be done for this pattern, including creating the diagram, written instructions, test tatting, and compiling some information on balanced double stitches. It will be a little while before the pattern is ready, probably December at the earliest.
