Design with me: Floral Heart

I've long admired Mary Konior's "Queen of Hearts" from her book Tatting with Visual Patterns. Ever since I saw the design, I wondered how it was created. I have some ideas, but they are only guesses.

After several years of tatting and designing, I finally gained the confidence to try to recreate Mary's Queen of Hearts, in my own way. In this blog post I will go over the steps that I used to create my design, which I've named Floral Heart:

When I design, I almost always think in terms of basic elements (rings and chains), which can be pieced together to form different types of tatted fragments. Each fragment can be duplicated to form larger pieces of tatting, such as a round in a doily. Below is a photo with examples of tatted fragments. There are five-ringed flowers, six-ringed flowers, trefoils, clovers, onion rings, and many more which lack standardized names:

Mary's Queen of Hearts is composed of a fragment which I have seen referred to as "The Scream" because it is reminiscent of the famous painting. Here is a photo of the Queen of Hearts design, and in the lower right corner is the fragment that makes up the heart:

There are nine of these fragments, all strategically placed and joined together to form the shape of a heart. There is a chain going between each of them, which allows travel from one fragment to the next. The chains also help to form the outline of the heart.

So, how did Mary put this design together? Perhaps she sketched it out on a piece of paper and worked from there. She could have tatted several of these fragments, and placed them together like puzzle pieces to build a heart. Or maybe she simply picked up her shuttles and worked version after version, until she had something that took the shape of a heart.

When designing my heart, I decided to go with the second option: tatting many sample fragments and placing them like puzzle pieces to form a heart. I chose a fragment that looks like a flower with picots, a fairly common shape in tatting. Below is a photo of the fragments:

I tried many different placements, but I found that mimicking what Mary did for her Queen of Hearts worked best. Below you will see nine fragments, positioned in a similar way to Mary's design:

Now, Mary did not have access to an iPad or apps when she built her design, but I do. I love to use my iPad and an app called You Doodle to draw on top of photos. It helps me to visualize where I want to go with my tatting. If you don't have these resources, you might try taping the tatted fragments down on a piece of paper and drawing connecting chains with a pencil. Below you can see that I have drawn connecting chains and other elements to complete the heart:

From here, it is a matter of calculating stitch counts. I tatted a few fragments with extra picots and a long chain, so that I could place them next to each other to see where everything would join up:

I basically held these two pieces in various positions on top of my iPad sketch, and took note of the stitch counts and join locations for all of the elements. It was a painstaking process and took me over an hour to get preliminary stitch counts.

At this point, I was NOT confident that the whole idea would work. I knew I'd end up with something, but I had my doubts that it would look like a heart. Well, I was pleasantly surprised when my first draft came out looking like this:

It was pretty close, and just needed to be cleaned up a bit. I removed the decorative picots on the outer chains, adjusted some joins, and tatted another sample:

This sample looked much cleaner, but still had issues in the lower part of the heart leading to the bottom point. I wanted to slim down the outer edge. I also noticed that the inner negative space could use a little cleaning up, so I went back to my You Doodle app and drew some samples:

On the left is a sample with a cleaned up outer edge and cleaned up negative space. The sample on the right just has a cleaned up outer edge. I decided to tat the sample on the left first. This is the resulting heart:

I was still curious how the sample on the right would look so I tatted that too:

After looking at my tatted samples, I decided to include both options in the final pattern. I tatted a few more versions for test tatting purposes, and to see how it would look in two colors:

And that's the process that I went through to create this heart. My blog post probably makes the whole thing seem more simple than it actually is. It took about 40 hours total, half of which was spent designing and the other half writing and testing the pattern. Keep in mind that I have been designing for several years now, and it has become easier with practice. If I tried to make this heart when I first started out I'm not sure if I would be successful (maybe I would but it would take a lot more trial and error).

Anyhow, I hope that those of you who are interested in design have found this post informative. Maybe some of you can adapt this process to make your own creations. In addition to hearts, I wonder what other shapes can be made in this way? I'm sure this process can be used to make other heart designs. Maybe that is something I will revisit in the future.

Looks can be deceiving

Take a look at this design. It looks simple, right? A flower in the middle, a round of rings and chains, and a series of flowers along the outer edge:

That's what I thought too, until I got stuck in a loop trying to make it work. Would you believe me if I told you that this is the most challenging pattern I have designed so far? Now, don't get me wrong, it's very straightforward to tat. But to design the thing, that's an entirely different ball game...

I began by referencing my binder of tatted samples to find a six ringed flower that would work. In general, a six ringed flower can be made by using the same stitch count four times, separated by three picots:

Some are more cumbersome to make than others because the rings are too small or too large to be tatted comfortably. That leaves three usable options: 4-4-4-4, 5-5-5-5, or 6-6-6-6.

Since I wanted to tat a coaster, I didn't have complete freedom in my choice. I needed to pick something that would work out to be the same size as a coaster, so I went with the middle option of 5-5-5-5.

I quickly learned that designing in the traditional way (from the center on out) would be incredibly time consuming. In my first attempt, the outer round was cupping badly. I was forced to increase the flowers to 6-6-6-6, and to stretch them to make everything lay flat.

I had an idea: If I designed everything backwards, I would save myself from having to cut off the outer round when things didn't work out. Instead, I could cut and rework the inner rounds, which took far less time to tat.

This got me closer to my goal, but I was still unhappy with the fact that such a small coaster had so many rounds (four to be exact).

I decided to try another version with smaller flowers, this time using the 4-4-4-4 stitch count. This is when another limitation of the design became evident. Since the first round started with six sides, I needed to continue using multiples of six throughout the coaster. This left me with the choice of 12, 18, or 24 flowers for the outer round (anything else would have been far too large). So, I tatted a version with 12 small flowers and a version with 18 small flowers:

Using a coaster that I purchased at a local craft fair for comparison, I noticed that my first attempt was too small and my second attempt was too large! What I did like about the small coaster was that it could be completed in three rounds instead of four. I would use this idea in the next phase of my design.

About a month went by before I decided to pick up the pattern again. This time, I used my original stitch count of 5-5-5-5 for the flowers, and reduced the coaster to three rounds. I started doing something a little differently though, which introduced a new problem. Instead of counting the join as the first half of the next stitch, I began to create full double stitches after each join. I noticed that my flowers wanted to close after five petals instead of six, and that I had to squeeze in a sixth petal each time.

The lack of room for a sixth petal occurred because I was using split rings to travel from one flower to the next. Split rings can distort the shape of the tatting, and in this case, they caused the center of each flower to become crowded.

Notice the difference in the photo below. The flower on the bottom has a split ring which acts like a balloon, pushing out the center and distorting the shape. The flower on the top is made with regular rings.

To remedy this, I had to use a stitch count that would normally create a flower with seven petals. Using a count of 5-4-4-5 works as a six ringed flower, just as long as you make a full double stitch after every join (or use a split ring to climb from one flower to the next):

While designing this coaster, another thought continually resurfaced: "What if someone wants to tat the coaster without split rings?" I needed to give it a try to make sure that it would work. Sometimes a concept that is completely feasible becomes far less possible when put into action. This was one of those times.

What I discovered is that flowers with regular rings are ever so slightly larger than those with split rings. (I'm not sure why other than to tell you that I measured it myself!) In addition, flowers with regular rings are joined to each other more loosely (through joining picots) while flowers with split rings are joined to each other more tightly (unless you create mock picots to counter this).

The larger size and looser join between non-split ring flowers creates an increase in circumference. This increase will ruffle the outer round if no other changes are made. And because I'm obsessive about things laying flat, I just had to change Round 2 to make everything work.

In the end, I came up with two versions of the same coaster. The yellow and green version has split rings to travel from one flower to the next. The pink and green version has 12 separate flowers in Round 3, each made with regular rings. The difference is a little hard to see in the photo, but the pink version has longer chains in Round 2, making it slightly larger than the yellow version.

After all was said and done I was left with a pile of completed coasters, each a little bit different from the last:

Here is another view, 14 attempts in all (not counting the incomplete scraps that never made it to full coasters):

So, can you see? Looks can be deceiving.

Design with Me: Cross of Sevens

Each time I attempt a design, I learn something new. Cross of Sevens taught me that it is a bad idea to design something while trying to avoid a certain stitch count. In this case, it is the number six. The idea for this pattern began when I was doodling squares on Kaleidoscope Drawing Pad. I came up with a sketch that resembled the central portion of a cross:

At the time, Kaleidoscope Drawing Pad lacked the feature that allows you to change symmetry mid drawing, so I was unable to make the rest of the pattern. I put it aside for a while and worked on other things.

Design with Me: Solstice

Sometimes life gets in the way and tatting gets put on hold. I thought about what I could post when I don't have any new tatting to show, and came up with an idea. I'm going to start a "Design with Me" series where I blog about how each of my designs came to be. Today will be the first post, and I will talk about "Solstice," which can be found on the free patterns tab.

I draw all of my designs on my iPad, using a free app called Kaleidoscope Drawing Pad. This app has undergone many changes, including the relatively recent addition of being able to choose the colors you draw with. I wanted to test the new feature to see if I could draw all shuttle 1 work in one color, and shuttle 2 work in another: