Tit for Tat

This post is all about my tatting. For those of you who don't know, tatting is the art of lace making. I use a shuttle, however I know you can also use a needle. Tatting is an old art form. I've seen patterns from as long ago as the 1800's. I've seen it in pictures longer ago than that. It is very time consuming and detailed and not the most easily grasped of skills. This means it isn't as popular among today's crowd as say knitting or crochet.

I am currently in the process of learning how to tat. So, you will all get to see my trials and failures as well as my hopeful successes. At the moment, I am working on a scrap of lace practicing how to do the basic stitches and join picots. I'm using a shuttle and size 80 thread. It's just a practice thing, but so far it's coming along rather well. I'm not following a pattern. I had a vague idea at the beginning of each row about how it should look and improvised from there.

That's what I like most about hand-made items. They are unique. They are whatever you want them to be. The hardest part is figuring out how to get what you want out of your head and into the project.