Needlelace - Take 1

One of my tatting WIPs requires a more 'dense' area, and tatting just doesn't do justice to it. So I thought that it might be possible to incorporate needlelace into the design.

Well, that's the long term goal. The short term goal is to actually learn how to do needlelace :)

So this is my first attempt at needlelace. At the suggestion from Liz (a needlelacer from Victoria, Australia), I purchased some beginner's books from the Guild of Needlelaces in the UK and gave it my best attempt. The books made the process reasonable easy (thank you whoever wrote the instructions).

This first picture shows the needlelace leaf design still on the backing fabric. The directions stated to 'stitch the outer cord down to the fabric with very small stitches'. Well, that was a distasteful thought to me, so I got the old faithful sewing machine out and stitched the cord to the backing fabric with a very large zig-zag stitch. Seemed to work OK....



This second picture shows the completed article - TA-DA! Next time around I will 'snip' the blasted zig-zag stitches better instead of merely yanking the poor needle lace off the backing fabric in a rough and disrespectful way. The poor little leaf lost a little bit of shape in the process.

Long awaited doily

It was definitely time to tackle a larger tatting task than I had previously undertaken, so a doily pattern was chosen.

Debbie Arnold made this opportunity possible by kindly sharing her Purple and teal square doily pattern on the Web.

This pattern was interesting and enjoyable to tat. It gave me the opportunity to polish up on my 'unpicking' skills. It even gave me the opportunity to learn how to 'cut out' mistakes that were too large to unpick (twice!).

Debbie warns that rows 8 to 10 are 'count carefully rows'. And I'd like to confirm that she wasn't joking:)

I hope to come across other patterns that she has designed because her doily pattern keeps its shape nicely when completed.