Digging through my purse for reasons, I ran into some of my tatting shuttles, still loaded with silk. And I needed a fidget toy. So I started this chain; eventually I’m hoping it will be long enough to go around a round goblet cover, but I am not making any promises. Note: I know I have two shuttles here, but the red thread does not need to be on a shuttle for this pattern; the white shuttle is doing all the work. The circles are made using a white loop and the white shuttle; the red chains use the white as the center core.
The pattern is all about 3s, 6s, and 9s; each white circle and each red chain is 18 stitches long. I started by dividing each circle in half; so 9 stitches, a picot, and another 9 stitches, but in the first iteration the two circles connected at the same base kept flopping all over the place, so I added another connection between each pair of circles.
So the pattern is:
– Loop 1: 9 stitches, connect to picot (except for first loop), 6 stitches, picot to 3 stitches.
– Loop 2: 3 stitches, connect to the picot, 6 stitches, picot to 9 stitches.
– Chain: 6 stitches, picot to 3 stitches, picot to 3 stitches, 6 stitches.
The red picots, by the way, are to make sewing the band to the eventual goblet cover easier. The goblet cover that hasn’t been cut yet and will be sized to the eventual size of the project.
It’s been a while since I was actively tatting, and I’m definitely out of practice. But the nice thing about a project like this is that I can just keep fidgeting until I have a long enough piece. Or get fed up.