Motif #6 in 25 Motif Challenge

I got back to the patterns in Plate I from the DMC Tatting publication.

This is the original print from the publication in figure 3. This is an insertion and tatted insertions often had a crocheted header and footer to use in attaching it to fabric.

This is my first sample tatted in DMC Special Cordonnet size 20. Does it look familiar? If you've ever tatted booties or a basic bookmark, it's very likely you used this arrangement although maybe with a different stitch count or number of picots. This is the tatted part only.

The instructions make the first large ring 2---2-2---2. They say "long picot" instead of "---". You can tell from the photo that they did use a longer than usual picot at the sides. I'm not sure why as I'll explain shortly, but they have it measured perfectly in their sample. They also say to use a long picot in the smaller 4-4 ring. You really only need it long enough for the other 3 rings to join into.

You make a large ring, turn, leave a bare thread and make a small ring, turn, leave a space and make a large ring, joining to the large picot. You keep doing this as long as you want the insertion to be. Then on the opposite side, you do the same thing, joining the small rings in groups as shown in the photo.

It didn't tell you how long the bare thread should be. I was generous in this sample, but in a second one I'm making, I'm using a much shorter measurement.

So then I proceeded on to the crocheting, using the same size 20 thread. The instructions say to treble to join to the picots on the large ring but I could tell that was way too long compared to the photo. Knowing crochet terms are different in European countries, but not wanting to look it up, I changed it to a double crochet which looks the same as the picture sample. It said to chain 2 between each treble (double crochet) join and between each group of joins. That's what I did along the top of this piece and you can see it is too many stitches.

When I crocheted along the bottom side, I crocheted only 1 chain between the two picot joins and 2 chains between each group. It lays much better now but I think it is still slightly too long. Blocking might fix it. After the first row of crochet, the second row was a single crochet in each stitch and the final row is a double crochet, chain 1, skip one single crochet, double crochet in the next and repeat across. Do the same thing on the other side.

This ended up being quite a wide insertion. Thread size was not indicated. I do not know if the same size thread was used for both the tatting and crochet or not. It's possible a finer thread was used for the crochet part and in that case, the number of stitches might have worked out. At the very beginning, it does say 6 cord Special Cordonnet (no size) for tatting and DMC Flax Lace thread for knitting and crochet.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~ to be continued ~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~