Garden of Eden

The sun peeped through the clouds sufficiently for me to take a photo of my new wall hanging 'The Garden of Eden'.

The wall hanging is in a black frame, but alas, I'm unable to capture a photo of it that aligns the border in a straight line. Therefore, unfortunately this photo has been cropped to remove the border :(

It measures 40cm by 50cm inside of the border and the tree is about 35 cm tall.

The background is fabric - cloud material for the sky and green blotchy material for the grass.

My previous posts have shown close-ups of many of the individual items within it. Items not shown in the previous posts are:
- Bluebirds (designed by Anitra Stone)
- Robin (Designed by Jane Eborall)
- Wheelbarrow (Designed by Jane Eborall)
- Flowers (Designed by me)
- Shrubbery (Designed by me)

Fowl design

The wall hanging (mentioned in my previous post) consists of a menagerie of people's designs.

The hen and the rooster were from Christel Weidmann's book Tatting Farm Animals.

The baby chicks and the goose were designed by Jane Eborall


Haven't yet taken a photo of the finished product, and it is too big to scan.

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.

Jacobean Flower Spray

This Jacobean Flower Spray was designed by Mark Myers.

The pattern mentioned using Oliver Twist Thread. In the absense of that thread, I decided to do the design twice for comparative purposes. The first one was tatted in size 80 DMC and the second one was in size 50 Altin Basak.

The size 50 thread was more enjoyable and seems to look nicer. Plus...it hides the threads better :)

The design specified that the flowers were to have the threads cut and tied at the end of each row. However, my lazy side kicked in a bit and I changed the flowers slightly so that I could complete each flower without stopping at each round.

I really like the way that Mark has designed the leaf part of it. It keeps its shape really well. And best of all - the large frond can be tatted in one go without having to cut and tie the ends! Very important to me :)

Motif 21

Maple leaf - Take 2

I enjoyed doing Tammy Rodgers' maple leaf so much (mainly because there were no joins....) that I chose this same pattern to be my practice piece for finer thread. Yes, that's right, I've reached the stage of using size 80 thread!

The finer thread does not photograph as nicely as the thicker thread, but it looks so much nicer in the flesh. Must admit though, unpicking it and opening the ring was not an enjoyable task.

Motif 17

This little number was from Ruth Scharf's book Occhi and was tatted in.......Altin Basak of course!

The book contains some really nice designs. It is not written in English though, so hopefully I haven't strayed too far from the original design.

I really like the texture of the motif. Next time that I do this pattern it will be in green, because it looks like a leaf.

Motif 14

At last, some more motifs to put online! I scanned my last few motifs in the hope of uploading them to the site. But alas, they scanned in PDF instead of as a jpeg and I had already given them away before realising that PDF files can't be uploaded to this site :(

This Maple leaf (designed by Tammy Rogers) has been tatted on Altin Basak size 10. It was another one of those designs that was a pleasure to tat.

Motif 12

This clover leaf is a celtic not that I think may have originated from Ruth Perry. It was a fun design made from Coates Mercer cotton size 20.

It's surprising how a simple chain can be made into a picture just by twisting and twirling it a bit.

Motif 7

These rose leaves, which have been made using Altin Basak size 30, were designed by Toni Storer.

Tatting them was quite a pleasant experience and they didn't seem to take too long to make.

I'm still making the petals for the rose flower that will accompany these leaves.