First Tatting Design

Me? A Designer? Yes! I've accomplished my first tatted design. OK, so it's not marketable. Definitely simple, but it arrives with much pondering and a few lessons learned. This is Lesson 4 of the Design-Tat course I have been participating in.

The homework was to tat this central motif:

and then add a row of rings and chains, joining only to the chain picots and deliberately adding negative space. Since there is only a picot on every other chain, I had to think about this! Hmmmmm. Add negative space, and at the same time consider a previous lesson discussion about what was liked and not liked about some sample doilies. I chose to do this without peeking at other classmate's designs and comments in order to hopefully soak up some designing thoughts. There are some very experienced tatters in the class, so I'm sure there will be some very creative designs.

I started by tatting an edge to test the stitch count and see if it would a) reach from one picot to the next, and b) create the negative space I wanted. This was my first thought:

I tried to frill up the plain motif with some picots, but ended up with too many on that clover leaf. I also decided this would create 'points' rather than some negative space between the rounds, so I wondered what it might look like if I placed the edging the other direction and take out some of those picots - like this:

I like both ideas, but I'm learning that I would choose one over the other based on various things -what shape I want to end up with; will there be additional rounds; etc.

Since I understand the lesson is to design something to go 'out' to get to the next available join, and create negative space, both work. If I were going to continue with another round, I would probably choose the "pointy" round to add to. Since I am only doing this one round for the lesson, I decided to go with the more rounded style to finish the lesson. Here's the rounded style:

LOL. It's square. I'm not sure how I thought it would be round when there are only 4 joining picots! The other thing I learned is that I didn't plan ahead very well considering I have no picots to join another round to. (If I wanted to, that is!)

This designing stuff is definitely helping me learn a little more about tatting in general. I can see where I need some (OK, a lot of) practice, and I'm starting to see how the different elements work together. Now if I could just learn to think far enough ahead to hide the thread ends properly.