Learn tatting

I love to tat and it’s easier than people think. I’m the tatting editor at www.tatting.bellaonline.com Come find me there and if you need more ideas/help/information just let me know. The best book for needle tatters is Barbara Foster’s book Learn to needle tat. It can be found at Ben Franklin’s craft stores and other areas where tatting supplies can be found. It can also be found on Amazon.com

As for shuttle tatting. Here’s the web site that I pass on to newbies to help them get started….

http://www.geocities.com/tatrasutra/how2tat1.html

Again, if you have questions you can email me personally at Beverly5876@yahoo.com

Beverly

Found my shuttle and tatting thread.

Am still looking for my needlework book, that explains everything complete with illustrations.

My grandmother tatted before old age set in, so maybe I should go up North and see her…I haven’t seen her in a couple years anyway, and we really bonded over her teaching me things like cooking and needlework.

Well, I can make connected loopy things, anyway. My book’s not much good at explaining the fancier things, but I don’t think I’d have the patience to tat a tablecloth anyway.

it is going slow but i am adding the sites that helped me the most and will be adding tips to clarify those bits i was confused about

i am getting better, sometimes i get turned around but the more i do it the better it is

i am playing with using beads now too

I’ve made some progress on learning to tat. I spent a lot of time surfing the web looking at directions. Unfortunately I’ve also spent a lot of time surfing eBay as well. The end result is that I’m a little poorer and I now have two new tatting shuttles in addition to my pair of plastic clovers. One is bone and the other is wood. I love the feel of the bone one. It’s very small and smooth. I haven’t tried either. I also got two more booklets on tatting that came highly recommended from the Tatra-sutra site. They’re the first two books on her list: Easy Tatting and Tatting Patterns and Designs.

I read on a website somewhere that of all the types of lace out there, tatting is the hardest to learn and the easiest to do. Having tried tatting, I can see where this is so. Unlike crocheted lace or knit lace, tatting is not a familiar skill put to a different use – so you are learning from scratch. And unlike bobbin lace, there is no road map laid out in front of you because you work in three dimensions – so it is difficult to conceptualize. It isn’t something you arrange and assemble like netting or battenberg lace. But on the other hand, it really is just the same knot over and over again. I can see that once you learn the technique of this one knot and how to join picots, the only limitation is your imagination.

Oddly enough I had the least amount of trouble with the part that apparently gives others the most grief. Getting the tatting knot correct was very easy for me. My biggest trouble is being able to get my picots to be evenly sized and I am stumbling learning to two-shuttle tat or ball-and-shuttle tat, which is evidently the way in which one makes chains as well as rings. My main difficulty is that tatting is far more of a two-handed activity than even knitting, and I have a fat baby that likes to sleep in my lap. He resents the interruption of my forearm flexing under him while tatting, even though he doesn’t seem to mind my knitting, or even my typing on my laptop as I am doing at this moment.

So at this point I 1) figured out how to do the basic double hitch knot, 2) can do a picot, and 3) can make a ring. I need to learn how to do chains and joins, how to weave in knot ends and how to add more thread.

i have not made a whole piece of that is shuttle tatted
i did however pick up needle tatting this weekend and made my mother in law a butterfly

i have not updated the site…soon

i have created a website to help me journal this goal, it is called stitch-n-tat.

i am working on a new practice piece now

i have a book, a shuttle and thread

now i just need my fingers to learn the steps =)

I taught myself from a book which was extremely frustrating. It took quite a while to finally get the feel of when and where to put tension on the thread.

Once I figured that out things went much quicker.

I found it very soothing to the nerves.

I’ve heard needle tatting is easier to learn, but I learned with a shuttle.