I’ve been playing around with designing a tatted dragonfly for years, and have never been satisfied with what I have come up with.

BUT… when we were walking the dogs this morning, it struck me that I have been trying to do an accurate representation (in tatting) of still photographs of dragonflies.

What really clicked for me was that I realized that I wanted a simple image of the dragonflies in motion. I thought about what we see when a dragonfly zooms past us:

The oversize head, the streamline zip of the body and flashing  wings.

Ah! I’ve been putting waaaaaaaaaaaaay too much into the dragonflies for them to be workable as earrings. So, I simplified the design right down to match my ‘aha’ moment!

Since I have been test tatting my new Little Bird tatting shuttles, I decided to try my new dragonfly design with the new shuttles…….

And, here’s the result:

I am still testing the  pattern and fine tuning it. But, it’s close to what I had hoped for.

And, I am going to give this pair of earrings away!

Image Source: Noreen Crone-Findlay copyright 

Post from: Hankering for Yarn

Yesterday, I posted a note about the tatted cord that I have just designed. It’s for a Lady Hoare tatting shuttle that I made and broke… rats… so it became a necklace.

Here’s how I tatted the cord:

With a dental floss threader, thread a heap of ‘e’ beads onto the cone of Lion Brand Lamé yarn.

The cord is a sequence of *5 double knots (dk), slip a bead down the thread to the last dk, 1 dk, 1 picot, 1 dk, slip a bead down to the dk* repeated from * to *

The pic above shows the bead slipped down to the last of the 5 dk.

And the pic below shows the dk that holds the 1st bead in place.

Here’s the picot and the next dk:

So, I repeated the * to * for 30 inches (75 cm) and then took the thread through the eye of the jewelry clasp, and headed back up the cord:

For the 2nd half of the cord, I did 5 dk, then joined the shuttle thread to the picot, and repeated this process for the entire length of the cord.

At the end, I worked a ring of 9 dk, closed it, cut the threads, tied knots, trimmed the ends and did a little happy dance!

Image source: Noreen Crone-Findlay

Post from: Hankering for Yarn

this tatted cord:

I am really pleased with the cord. I wanted it to be simple and not too frou frou.

It’s light and really pleasant to wear.

I am going to make it up in other threads to see how it looks in other colors and textures.

I loved the process of coming up with this design, and now, I am super inspired about designing all kinds of other tatted jewelry!

Fun!

Image Source: Noreen Crone-Findlay (copyright)

Post from: Hankering for Yarn