Tatting Again!

Sunday I pretty much slept and tatted. I'm not sure why I slept so much but I took TWO naps! I actually started this tatting the night before, but it was the edging below which I'll get to next. I was tatting from a 1994 issue of Old Time Crochet and the article was by Rebecca Hollenbaugh. Her patterns show up in a lot of places but I've never seen her on any of the cyber lists or met her at any tat day. She's sort of a mystery to me.

She posted these patterns as coming from a December 1917 Needlecraft. They are motifs and edgings and I kind of wonder if I didn't use one in my "mystery motifs" posts last year? I got confused because the first photographs showed motifs with centers and I started tatting #1 without reading the heading. (yeah, I'm kinda bad about that) Turned out it was an edging, not the motif. So I tatted the edging until I ran out of thread on the shuttles and then started the motif. By this time I could tell it was not the one in the photograph. So I turned the page. Ah - there it was! Only those motifs had needle woven centers!

So here is the matching edging to the square motif with an empty center. LOL! The pattern is ONLY for the empty center. What she explained, if I had read more closely to begin with, is that she added the needle lace centers on her own and the first two motifs I saw had tatted centers which she had also added on her own. She did NOT give directions for either of the tatted centers or how to do the needle lace.

I had to figure that out on my own. Now I've done a little needle lace but I still had to refresh my memory and I wasn't sure how to begin...where to hide my beginning thread. I ended up stitching through the bars of a completed ring and ending at a picot where I would be attaching the base threads to weave through. That worked out well for beginning and then for ending, I just used the needle to weave the thread through the now woven center. Unfortunately, my first weaving ended up smaller than the other three and since it was the beginning, I couldn't figure out how to do it over without messing everything else up. I do like the way it ended though, in spite of that one smaller wrapped segment.

I don't know what thread it is but it's finer than 20. I found a couple of shuttles wound with white thread that I'd started something with and made a mistake and abandoned. I cut it off and started this instead. I really do like it and will try some others eventually. At the moment, I have a few UFO's to finish and a few more exercises in T.A.T. to finish up before I can send it off in a few weeks.