Making Sketches

After spending weeks tatting snowflakes, wrapping gifts, and getting ready for the Holidays, I've finally had a chance to sit down and do something more relaxing. I decided that I wanted to try sketching some potential designs the old fashioned way...with pencil and paper. Many doodles and pieces of paper later, I ended up with a butterfly and a heart:

Prior to this, I had been exclusively using Kaleidoscope Drawing Pad to come up with ideas. While this app works really well for snowflakes, squares, and crosses, I was never able to create a satisfactory butterfly or heart. It seems that the less points of symmetry an object has, the more difficult it is to draw on an iPad.

There's no telling if these ideas will translate into tatting, though I try my best to keep my drawings within the confines of expected thread behavior. Nothing too fancy or confusing.

On another note, I liked the way the Priscilla bookmark turned out, so I decided to tat one for myself. This one is in progress and I'm using Lizbeth size 80 in the color Rainbow Taffy.

I didn't wind enough thread onto the shuttles, so I will have to add more as I go...something I try to avoid because I hate both sewing in ends and tatting over tails!

Fun with drawings

Sometimes it's fun to see what a design element will look like with different points of symmetry. The following images have been drawn individually, using the Kaleidoscope Drawing Pad app on my iPad.

Here is the same idea, done with four, five, six, and eight sides:

Can you see the repeating elements?

Once I have a basic drawing, I will often need to go back and alter portions of it to increase the chance that it will be tat-able. Just glancing at the image above, I can see that the angle of the long outer chains in the square motif would be difficult to maintain. The same might go for the five sided motif. The hexagon would probably be okay to make a simple snowflake. Lastly, the octagon would need to have some alterations to enlarge the outer rings.

Let's look more closely at the octagonal drawing. As points of symmetry increase, the spacing between the outer rings gets smaller, causing them to eventually become scrunched and out of proportion with the inner rings:

To remedy this, I can redraw the motif, extending the chains outward to make the piece larger:

This looks pretty good, but I can still see that the roundness of the outer chains might cause problems. So, I changed the direction of some of the chains to come up with this:

I think that gives a better visual effect overall. Let's add a second round to continue with the theme of lots of rings:

This might make a nice coaster. For now, drawings like this get put into a "Things to Tat" folder on my iPad. I've accumulated quite a few ideas that are waiting to become tatted designs. I will have to wait a while as I am currently putting my efforts into continuing progress on the Stawasz Mega Doily.