An angry wolf and a swine was having fun...

No, it's not  from a fable. It's just my lupus acting up and me, being so stupid as to get the swine flu vaccination on top of it. Too late I found out, that the doctor only had the vaccination with the immune system booster, which is kinda bad when you actually try to supress the immune system all that you can. :P It will probably take a while before I'm back on track again.

Did my muse go on vacation?

She (or shouldn't I, as a woman, have a male muse? I mean we do live in an age with gender equality, don't we?) wasn't helpful at all when I tried to find inspiration to the stitch count for my design project. As I wrote earlier, I'm not that happy with the way the 1. and the 2. round looks when put together. It seems like the piece needs a round 3. or a change in either the 1. or the 2.

However, until I test tatted I did honestly think it would make a nice, flat something, but alas, that was not to be. It has a remarkable cup-shape now, and even if I were to beat it down with a sledge hammer, I'm quite sure it would pop back in that shape again. There is no way that is ever going to be flat (I think I might have done permanent damage to the scanner in the attempt to get a decent picture :o). So...back to the drawing board. Now, please ascend, you muse of fire tatting and give me the right stitch count so I don't have to do it all over again next time. QQ

Next projects

I've got 2 projects I'm working on atm (not counting the UFO-baby cap I ought to have finished ages ago). My first project is inspired from some fabric I saw in a hobby shop. Creamy white linnen with *yuck* spiders on it. I immediately thought of a gothic / Halloween'ish sort of pouch, with a thicker black edging than I usually do. It will also get some kind of a handle, I've decided. I'm almost done with the edging itself. I used Cebelia 30, which is some what thicker than my usual DMC 80. I will have to see how it works out on the final bag, but atm I'm thinking it could have been fun with an even thicker yarn.


My other project is for the design class. I made a pattern, inspired by a snowflake and the upcoming Christmas. Sort of a wheel-shape surrounded by hearts. It looks very good on paper, if you ask me :P, but now that I'm tatting it, I'm not sure if it works as well as I hoped. The center is very dense while the ring of hearts is the opposite. I think it might need a 3. round to sort of balance the first and the second? Pictures coming up when I'm done, which should hopefully be in a day or two.

Big promises!

Some time ago I found a marvelous little book from 1915 hidden away in our Royal Library, in the Medicin / Science department. How on earth a tatting book ended there would probably make a great story. I imagine a tatting secretary in the late 1920'ies secretly giving it the wrong label so she could keep it for herself for the next decades. :D

But the weird, handwritten label isn't what make this book so fun. It's the titel itself:  "BOGEN OM ORKIS - Regler for at komponere et uendeligt antal mønstre på den hurtigste måde". My best translation (bear with me): "The book about tatting - rules for composing an unlimited amount of patterns in the quickest possible way". I must say the dear Esther didn't lack self confidence. :D

I must confess I eagerly grabbed the book when it came to my hands. Imagine: Here I had the book that would reveal to me how I could design an unlimited amount of patterns and then be quick about it too! It was almost like when Indy could hold the Holy Grail in his hands for the first time!!


Sadly, I think the book had more to reveal in the 1920'ies than today. Her best advise is to change the numbers of picots and size of rings and chains, and take one motif and entangle another / tat another one around it 'for endless possibilities'. I guess it wasn't this book that was supposed to start my design career. :P Apart from that bitter disappointment :D I really like the book. There is just something about old / older books. The looks, the texture, the smell, the way they used the words...I wish I could keep it, but sadly I have to hand it back in today. Bye bye Esther, it was fun.

A leap into the seventy thousand fathoms of water :-o

When I started this blog I knew that I someday wanted to make it a public blog. How ever I am so very much a chicken so until now only a few select people have had access. Now I finally managed to get the courage to publish it, thus taking my own grand leap of uncertainty (yes, I always favored drama \o/) and make it yet another tiny drop in the big ocean of blogs. :P With a bit of luck I might even get someone to browse past it at some point. :D

Yet another star and some design sighs

Lots of things has happened lately, so I haven't found the time to scan this star I made a while ago, when I was staying a couple of days at my parents place.
I still haven't found out whether I dare iron this metallic yarn or not, so if it looks sloppy I hope that's the reason. :P
I need to make many more, if I want to keep the promise I made to myself.
How ever it's a lot more fun to work on a new pattern for the design class. I'm very proud of the looks of it *beaming with pride*, there is just one "slight" detail that is troubling me at the moment. How on earth am I supposed to find the right number of stitches for the design? It looks so nice on paper, but I'm quite sure it won't look anything like it at all, if I try tatting it with the numbers I've tried so far. Making your own patterns is indeed a lot harder than one should think, and I didn't expect it to be easy.

Bits of this and that

It turns out the bag was very well received, which makes me so happy. I've never made a bag like this before, and I had no pattern for it (couldn't find one I liked), so I build it in normal paper first and then made my own. The thing she liked best was apparently the pentagram, so good thing I ended up putting it where I did. :D

And I have to post how a good girl I've been! I stuck to my promise and made a Christmas Star / Snowflake yesterday, before I started anything new. I'll see if I can post a picture of it soon.

New book!! \o/

There isn't anything like getting a big, brown parcel, knowing it's one or more books that you have been waiting for for weeks. This time I got Jan Stavasz's "Tatting theory and patterns."

The book is really a joy. It's hardback, which is always a plus, and full of wonderful patterns. I really don't know where to start...And tbh. I ought not to have ordered it all now, since I promised myself I would start on some Christmas decoration IN GOOD TIME this year. But...eh...maybe it would be wrong of me to break my long tradition of finishing everything in the absolute last second? It might turn over the whole world order, and we do not want that to happen, right?!! So I guess it's my duty to try out one of those beautiful necklaces first. And after all there are still many days (and late nights) until December. :D

Procrastination ftw :P

Why start working on something straight away, when you can procrastinate and wait an extra day or even a few hours? :P

Again I managed to wait too long to start on the last bit of the bag, but again I did actually manage to be done just in the last second. How ever there wasn't enough time to get a proper photo of the finished bag, so here are some work in progress ones: [deleted].

The first is how it looks from the front - only the finished one actually did close properly. :P And eh...it did not have a pin stuck through it.

And this is the inside [deleted]. For a long time I didn't really know whether to use the pentagram at all. Originally, I planned it to be on the front, above the flower edge, but it turned out to be far too crowded. Then I thought about putting it on the backside of the bag, but it would just get messy, since it would rub against the coat all the time. Finally, I decided to put it on the inside. When the lining was sewn to it's place (it's not even pinned in place on the photo) and the pentagram as well, it turned out ok, I think. Now I just hope the girl will end up liking the finished bag.

Stars and flowers on my mind

Well....turns out I wasn't really on my feet again, but hopefully I am now.
I haven't had much tatting time the last couple of weeks. I've been trying to figure out how to draw patterns (thanks so much to Sharon's design course! :D), and I've been working on a gift to the daughter of a friend of mine. She is a young wiccan and I promised to make (yet another) bag, this time for her. I've been working on how to create a nice looking pentagram. It took some tries but I am happy with the end result now.



I'm nearly done with a matching edge (same green / pink flowers), but haven't decided on the bag design yet. :( I would really like to do something different than the usual pouch, and I can't wait much longer to decide. The bag needs to be done thursday at the latest! =:-o

Silver and untidy ends :o

I haven't' fallen completely asleep. Unfortunately I've been a bit ill, but I'm getting on my feets now. Here is a bit I did a while ago - I was just too lazy to hide the ends until yesterday. :P I sincerely wish I never had to hide any ends ever. I know you can do the magic trick, but I always end up breaking the thread or draw the hole piece skewed, or I get so eager when I start a new project that I forget to think ahead. Anyway I always end up with a billion ends (at minimum!!), and then I leave the piece in my tatting basket until "a day where I suddenly feel an urge to hiding ends" (as if that day existed :P). But yesterday I was a good girl and finished 2 projects.

One is a bracelet made with beanile lace (I had to try something after I got that book :D). The colors are a bit random. The silver beads were the only beads I had lying around, and the white yarn was the only yarn with the right size. I tried with my usual DMC 80 first, but the knots were too small. They simply disappeared in the beads. It did turn out ok, I think, though I would have preferred black yarn and maybe some more colorful beads. I think I will have to make another one at some point.

The other project was a small Christmas ornament. A star made with metallic
silver colored yarn from the "24 Snowflakes in Tatting" by Lene Bjørn. It's a cute motif, and the yarn works very well for this, I think. My only worry is if I can actually iron that kind of yarn? If you look close on the picture, you will see that I haven't done it yet. I think I better tat a test sample and test how the yarn responds to heat, before I try ironing the real piece, even though if it's through the usual damp piece of cloth.

So many plans, so little time...

I'm still working on multiple projects. My birthday was in late August and I got several tatting books as presents, amongst those Nina Libin's "Beanile Lace", which I *had* to spend some time on. :D
Before I make any grander projects, how ever, I need to get some new beads. I've started to think about making some beaded snowflakes for Christmas. I do feel a bit like the woman dreaming with the basket of eggs on her head...while I imagine all the lovely pieces I can make, I will probably make the worst mess out of it ever or even stab myself to death with the tatting pin. Maybe I ought to learn to master (or at least use) the technique before I plan the awesome designs I want to make with it. :P


I also started following Sharon's Design-tat, which is very, very fun so far. I'm not overly happy about my designs yet, but on the other hand - if I was, why take the class? In the last lesson we all had to make a design from the same starting point - eight 4-4-4-4 rings connected with 4-4 chains. My first design was a very simple one. I wanted a cloverlike shape, but ended up with something looking a bit more like a tudor rose. There ought of course have been some extra rounds, but I misread and thought part of the challenge was only one round.


A couple of days after I finished that design, I woke up one morning and had dreamt about another design. I had the whole design in my head when I woke, and of course I had to try and make that as well. It came out ok, I think, even though in my dream it was a lot easier to make even sized very large rings. :P In reality I tightened too much when I pulled them together, but since I didn't believe I would be able to make it all right in first go, I didn't bother to unravel - I thought I would be unravelling any second anyway. It turned out I didn't - I actually did it all right in the first go :o. But I guess I ought to make a new one with a proper tension in the rings. Wtb more time...

Thérèse de Dillmont's "Tatting"

I have always been interested in the history of crafts and art. As a young teenager I was often seen at the library with my nose in books about dressmaking from earlier centuries and the like, so when I started to tat, of course I had to learn about the history of tatting aswell.

Several women have been great contributers to modern day tatting, and one of them, Thérèse de Dillmont, who is mostly known for her Encyclopedia of Needlework also wrote a wonderful little booklet, simply called Tatting, which I just managed to secure from the library of my local Art and Design Museum. :D

I really want to recommend it, not only because it's great fun to sit with a book from such an important author in your hands, but also because it has such sweet designs. I have especially fallen in love with some of her medaillons, one of which inspired me to an earring last night. I won't post a picture yet, since I'm not perfectly happy with it yet, but I think it will be good, when I have changed a couple of things to the design. At least I hope so.

Instead I will post another of Thérèse's work, an illustration (medaillon) from the Encyclopedia of Needlework. The pattern is described at the link above. It's quite different from the one from "Tatting", but it has the same beautiful emphasize on the center, which I really like. I've already used the center part of the pattern to create several beautiful small flowers, and I've started to think about how to make round 2 into a sunflower. It should be possible, but I'm not sure when I will have the time to test it.

And more...>.< (I do other stuff than various bags as well, you know)

My sister said she liked my tatting bag a lot (ofc. she has to say so - it's sort of an obligation when you present some hard work in front of people's noses, saying "ISN'T IT BEAUTIFUL??!!! I SPEND AGES ON IT!" You can't really be polite and say "nah...it kinda sucks"). Anyway...I chose to believe her, and made a bigger one (about 30 cm. high) in her favorite colors for her birthday. I might add that my sewing machine broke a while ago, so I actually did it all by hand. Well, I didn't weave the fabric or spin the thread, but you get the point. :P



You can't really see much of the lining of this photo, but ofc. it's the same burgundy sort of color as the rest. I need to practice a bit more on making silk roses, but all in all I was quite happy with the final result.

The lace is a pretty standard trefoil one, but I find it very pretty.

More bags :D

Can you ever get enough bags? No, I don't think so. Bags are like shoes - no matter what your hubby says, there is always room for some extras. :D



The first bag I made because I wanted something else to carry my tatting around in that the plastic bag I was using at the time. I wanted it to be easy to carry and ofc. I wanted some lace on it. I thought of different designs but ended up with this very classical one, because I think it really shows the lace to it's advantage. I made the lining quite colorful, again to make the lace more visible. Sorry for my not so apt photo-skills. :-X

And a detail pic:

Cell Phone bag

Unfortunately I haven't been accustomed to take pics of the stuff I've made. I only have one picture of one of the early things I made, which was a cell phone bag for my sister. I don't have a picture of the finished piece, only a work in progress one. I used kinda thick thread for it to be durable. I used a pattern for an intersection, which I made in the length of the phone. Then I tatted a similar on to the first and so on, until I had 6 in total, assembled to a little bag. I lined the bag with some black 'silk'thingie, I got from some jewelry wrapping once, and it actually turned out quite nice.

So...I decided to make a blog, what now?

I started tatting about 2 years go. When I was 15 I inherited a shuttle from my grandmother, and ever since I've known that some day I would learn how to use it. Years went by and I tried all sorts of old crafts - embroidery, cross-stitches, nålebinding (aka knotless netting / knitting), spinning with a spindle, making felt, knitting, crochet and such. Finally, I thought it was time to pick up that shuttle and get started, and from the first moment I was hooked.

Since that moment, I have searched the internet for blogs and websites, the library for books and articles, and of course I've made various pieces along the way. As it seems like everyone, except me, have a blog these days, I thought I would get one as well. I'm sure the world will be a better place if I foist pictures and ramblings on random people that might pass by. :P