Custom Pages

Monday, November 25, 2019

Etsy Sale

I'm having an Etsy sale with everything in the shop 20% off, now through Tuesday, December 3. If you'd like to check it out you can get to my shop by clicking HERE.

Below is a photo of some of the designs available in my shop:


If you're wondering why I still have all of these tatted samples, it's because I file them away into binders each time I make a new pattern. I'm up to four binders now.


The tatted samples are placed into plastic sheet protectors. I try to remember to put my pattern notes in there too.


Each binder holds somewhere around 20 to 25 patterns. The tatted samples make the pages bulky, so the binders don't hold has much as they would if it was just paper.

Monday, November 4, 2019

Designing with Amaziograph

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.