More Tatting Adventures...

Ok, here i am again. I have taken all the beginner classes with Georgia Seitz on  http://www.georgiaseitz.com/. I highly recommend these classes for anyone, especially if you are learning to tat. They have "meetings" on Chatzy twice a week and twice each day. The Monday class is for more advanced tatters but beginners are welcome if you crave a challenge. Georgia also has needles and shuttles, as well as some other tools of the trade, for sale to help support the web site. She makes shuttles also and they are very lovely and reasonably priced compared to other handmade shuttles i have run across.
Now i need to find a smallish project that i will be sure to finish to apply what i have learned and improve my technique. In the old days they called them "samplers." Maybe i should sit down and design something incorperating everything i have learned so far. I think I will get back to you on that one. I could then throw in tatting design on my crafting resume.  In the meantime, here is some stuff i have been working on. Here are pictures from Lesson two in Georgia's classes:

 This Pattern is called Hen & Chicks and there is a pattern and a more in-depth tutorial written for it in PDF format by Mimi Dillman. A link to both are provided on the lesson two page of Georgia's site. I have been working on this one since before the classes started and kept loosing track of where i was on the pattern. As a result i was joining to the wrong ring/picot or just making the wrong ring in the pattern. I kept starting over again and again before i finally won that battle, but i did it!!! :D
Next, Cynthia, one of the volunteer instructors on Georgia's class, sent me an ebook titled; Basic Tatting  Handbook by Sarah Kelley, to go through and evaluate for her. I found the book to be well written and instructions and illustrations were clear and informative. Once i got past the very first exercises i found a confusing formatting error and felt that there was information needed for finishing a motif (the final join...) but, otherwise a good book for a beginning tatter looking for basics. Here is the work i did on the exercises thus far from that book:

The two bottom medallions are the same pattern but i made a wrong join on the first (white) one. So i decided to attemt it again with two colors. There are several more rows to this one to make a small doily, which i intend to finish in time. I actually did these before i finally succeeded with the Hen and Chicks pattern, so it did prove to be a good source of exercises to practice on.

I finally found a doll needle with a small enough eye and long enough to try needle tatting with #10 thread and it worked out pretty good. Here are the results of that endeavor:

Once again, i messed up a join on the first (white) medallion so i redid it. Can you spot the bad join? I hope i can acquire a smaller needle (#5 and/or #7) somehow so i can work with the smaller threads. I prefer the shuttle, but am told that working with beads in tatting is a bit easier on the needle, which is why i got started in tatting to start with :)

My next exercise was to learn to do split rings, which i decided to try with finger tatting and a much heavier thread. I think it was a size 3 but i am not sure. The majority of my threads are thrift shop finds so some of the information on them was not available. I did go on to use some of the same thread to make a dish rag too.  Here are the results of my work on split rings:

 Now I need to learn to do split chains and how to them and split rings on the needle. The rings on the left are just rings that I practiced finger tatting on while i was showing my son, Patrick, how to tat. As you can see on the other two pieces, split rings have a lot of design potential making it possible to turn corners and "climb out" of a row instead of cutting thread to start the next one.