Learn Needle Tatting: A Beginner's Step-by-Step Guide to Rings, Chains, Picots, and Your First 14 Lace Projects

For its first ten years, tatting could not be joined. Makers worked one ring at a time, then sat down and sewed the rings together by hand, knot by knot, to make anything larger than a ring. Then, in a pattern book of the early 1850s, an anonymous needlework writer described hooking a loop of thread through a picot so the rings linked themselves as you worked. Within about fifteen years the chain had followed, and the craft had everything it still uses today. You can learn that whole technique set in this book, in the order it was invented, using a needle instead of a shuttle. >This book teaches that one knot, and then the handful of ways to arrange it, until you can design lace of your own rather than only follow someone else's. Fourteen projects put each new skill to work the moment you have it, and every project card tells you its skill level, its finished size, and how long it actually takes - so you can pick a twenty-minute charm on a weeknight and save the doily for Sunday. Inside: - The one knot every piece of tatted lace is built from, taught as two small separate actions before you ever combine them- The tactile cue that tells you a stitch has seated correctly - you feel it before you can see it- Three mistakes that account for almost everything that goes wrong on a first ring, named before you make one- Why a ring refuses to close, and the two causes behind almost every case- The five symbols that turn a printed pattern line into plain instructions- Split rings, so you can change direction without cutting your thread- A troubleshooting index built the way you actually search: start from the symptom, find every project that treats it Written for the adult beginner who has never tatted, and for anyone who tried a shuttle once and set it aside. The needle holds like a pencil, and it forgives the small tension mistakes every first hour contains. Fourteen projects, one knot, and a craft that fits in a pencil case. Start with the charm and see how far the same knot goes.