Lesson 10 - Colour

Some of you have had fun with drawing over the snowflake but for others it has been a nightmare. That's OK. It's just one tool to give you a starting point. Different designers approach designs in different ways. A lot of that has to do with what you are designing. If you like making earrings you can often create and try out several new variations in one evening because earrings aren't very big. For quicker projects, trial and error is often the best choice because you can tat it and see the results immediately. So maybe you are the kind of person that can only design with the shuttle in your hand.
Both ways of designing are good and both can give wonderful results. If you design with shuttle in hand you just need to choose a starting point and go. You can begin with a 4 ring motif, a rose, or some other small motif or even a single ring. Just changing the number of picots on the starting ring changes the options you have and the direction in which your design will go.

So lets go on to another feature of design, colour. Colour can do amazing things for a design. A plain boring ring and chain design can be jazzed up with a rainbow of colours. Colour can make or break a design, but if a design looks good in basic white or ecru, colour can only improve it. However bad colour mixes can totally ruin a good design.

Rather than assume that everyone knows the basics of colour I'm going to cover them here. There is a lot of information on colour that can be seen on the internet, but the information can be a little confusing. That's because pigment colour like the colour that is used in an artist's palette is based on the primary colours of Red, Yellow and Blue; but a lot of the internet information refers to website colours seen on a computer screen and they're based on light waves. That colour palette is based on Red, Green, Blue. What we're interested in is pigment colour like the kind that's used to created thread dyes.
There are a couple of good websites with a lot of colour information and you might want to check out these:
http://plaza.ufl.edu/mmcadams/colorpages/index.htm
http://www.designbiz.com/net4/CompanyColor.asp?CompanyID=82357

The primary colours of Red, Yellow and Blue, don't look very good when they are together. So how do you get green thread from just 3 colours? by mixing them of course. Red and Yellow together give you Orange. Add more yellow and get a lighter orange, add more red and get a darker orange.
Mix Yellow with Blue and get Green. More Yellow gives a lighter green, more Blue give a darker green. Take Red and mix it with Blue to get Purple. Add more red or more blue to get everything from violet to burgundy.Have you ever noticed how many English words there are to describe purple?

The in between colours Orange, Green and Purple are known as secondary colours. When you mix the secondary colours with more of one of the primary colours in it, you get Tertiary colours like Orange/Red or Yellow/Orange. OK so we know how to get some other colours, but how do we use them? For that we need to go to what is called a colour wheel like this one. Here the colours are arranged in a circle or wheel that makes it easier to pick out shades of colour that will look good together. A thread in a primary or secondary colour from one side of the wheel will look good combined with tertiary colours on the opposite side of the wheel as accents. Tertiary colours because they contain a little of this and a little of that will happily play together with other colours while the primary colours are a little bit stuck up and will only play with one or two special friends.


So how does knowing this help us with designing? It helps us to choose colours that work well together rather than choosing colours that we may like, but they don't look good in the finished lace.

We have to remember though, that when we create a design for others to tat, they will choose to use the colours they like. I like blues and reds so they are the colours I work with most often, but I know other people like green, yellow and orange. If I do a design in blue it probably won't appeal to someone who likes fall colours, yet if I do the design in white they will see it's possibilities in orange and someone else will see how lovely it would look in purple. So unless the design just does not work - like the ring and chain doily done in rainbow colours- unless you use specific colours, it doesn't really matter what colour you use for your design. As long as the colours you use are appealing together. Even if it uses colours that other people don't care for, they should be able to imagine it in colours they do like.

Which brings me to one of my pet peeves which is the overuse of variegated threads. If you have created an intricate design, please, please, don't make the mistake of tatting it in variegated thread. The design will get lost in multicoloured thread and the design won't do the thread justice. A simple design like the plain ring and chain will absolutely come to life done in a variegated thread. You have all seen the butterfly I use as my logo. Here it is on the left in a solid colour. and you can see that it has a nice butterfly shape, but other than that it's a pretty boring butterfly design.

Here it is again on the right done with a solid thread on one shuttle and a variegated thread on the other, which makes a huge difference to the overall appearance of the design. Using all variegated thread would not have had the same effect at all. There is one other difference in that the design on the right has one more ring on each wing. The positioning of the dark section of the variegated thread makes all the difference in the world.

It isn't so much what colour you use for a design as to where you use it. Colour is so much a matter of preference, that I almost want to say that it really doesn't matter to a design, but of course you know that isn't true. It isn't so much the colours themselves as it is the colour intensity that you have to be concerned with. A vivid colour will draw the eye, so you must be careful to use vivid colours where you want the eye to go. If you want to highlight a design element, that's where the brightest colours should be. The rest of the design should use more muted tones so that the colours aren't fighting with one another for attention. On the other hand you don't want to use colours so pale and washed out that it make the whole piece of lace seem drab.

Colour is your friend. It can only make your lace look lovelier, just as long as it isn't overdone.

Lesson 9

Let’s do a quick recap of the previous lessons. We began with rings and chains like the sample here and discovered that if we have uniform rings like these that are 5-5-5-5 then chains of 5-5 work well with them.

If you take a look at the diagram you can see that from the base of the ring on the left to the join is 5 (marked in blue) and from the join to the base of the next ring (marked in red) is 5. The total of these 2 numbers is 10 which represents the length of chain required. So if the stitch count on the ring on the left was 4 and the one on the right was 8 the chain length would need to be a total of 12. These are approximate numbers based on lace that is in a straight line. Using 75% of the total number will give you a chain with very little arc. In the example here the total is 10 and 75% of that is 7.5 so a stitch count of 7 gives the almost straight line shown in the picture. When the lace has to bend around a curve like going around a doily or the arch on a heart, the chains need to be longer. If the curve is inverted the chains can be shorter.

So how do we apply that information to a cloverleaf? Take a look at the diagram below. Just like with the ring and chain, all we have to do is total the stitch count from one connection point of the chain to the next connection point. The ring on the left is 5+5 (in blue) and the one on the right is 5+5 (in red) The total stitch count is 20 so a chain of 20 will fit this design. You can see in the finished lace which has a picot every 5 stitches for easy counting, that 20 stitches fits perfectly.

The second part of the homework was to make a cloverleaf edging with shorter side rings. This sample has side rings of 3-3-3-3 and retains the central ring of 5-5-5-5. The stitch count from side to side for this design is 6 on the left and 6 on the right or 12. Again for ease of counting the chains are in increments of 5 so the chains are 15 not 12, but you can see how as a rough guideline that this simple method of counting stitches will help you know what your stitch count needs to be.

Of course having a plan for where you are going with a design sure helps figure out your stitch count. If you have a picture or a sketch to work from it’s much easier to tell how big your rings need to be or how much your chain has to arc.

Now that we have looked at using a drawing program to make a drawing of a finished piece of lace, lets look at using it to create the design itself. Tatting even when you tat fast, is a long slow laborious process. Drawing on the other hand doesn’t have to take very long at all.
Take a look at this snowflake image:
It already looks a bit like tatting. There are white areas that might suggest lace or grey areas that might suggest rings. Your homework is to draw on top of this image a design that can be tatted. When you are done with it upload the JPG of your drawing to the photo album labelled Snowflakes

Trial Run

Drawing programs can be useful for trying out all kinds of ideas. I had plans to make a strip of lace for a bracelet or choker that I could use as a strap for a central piece of jewelry. Since I didn't have any flashes of inspiration I just started playing around with different ideas seeing how they would look and figuring out what would work best and what would be the easiest to tat.

I started with a basic little 4 ring bit. It was too small so I tried 4 of them which was better. Then I thought a small side ring might give some variation. It seemed kind of boring and it was going to be a pain working through all of the necessary split rings.

Then I thought maybe a square of cloverleaves but the chains on the inside made it a stinker to work in a continuous row. Since I wanted a strap like effect and not just a single motif, what I was striving for was the look of a motif but the continuous flow of an edging.

I took the already created cloverleaves and made a copy of them that I could keep going back to, to copy and paste. You can see it in the lower right.

Then I copied the clovers again and put the chains on the outside which was an improvement, but not quite what I needed so I rotated it.

The next version looked better but meant that I had to do a cloverleaf in the middle of working a split chain in order to work it continuously. It's possible, but awkward to work. Some designs are like that. They look good, but they're fussy to tat. Most people will refuse to work this kind of a design because it's just more trouble than it's worth. I usually find another way of doing it when I get this kind of a problem.

So I tried it again without the side clovers, which made it nothing more than a chain and clover edging. B-o-r-i-n-g. I added a little interest with some large ring/small ring combination, but it made the centre look bare and unconnected. I thought that a row of tiny split rings would help, but when it came to tatting the design it was already wide enough so I actually tatted something a little different from the diagram.

It would have taken 4 or 5 hours to tat the various samples just to see which looked good and which had the best "flow". Doing several trial pieces in the drawing program saved me hours of tatting time and resulted in a finished piece much faster.

When you use a drawing program, you don't have to have a specific purpose in mind. You can use it to just try out different ideas and see what they look like.

Looking with a critical eye

It is easier when you are looking at patterns done by other people to see the flaws in the design. Sometimes you agonize so much over stitch count and ring arrangement that it becomes hard to step back from the design and take a serious look at it as a whole. Take a look at this motif. It has uniform shape and size, the pattern is balanced left and right, top and bottom. But there's something (besides a poor blocking job) that's wrong with it. Can you see the problem with this design?

You can't fix something in your design, until you can see what is wrong with it. Sometimes you need to put a design aside for a while and then come back and look at it with a fresh perspective.

Lesson 8

To complete the tutorial on using drawing software, lets look at finishing. Just as a nice piece of tatting looks better for having the ends sewn in and the lace blocked, so does a drawing. Here are some pointers on using drawing software and creating easy to follow diagrams.


The PDF file has been uploaded to the group Files.

Lesson 7

This is a continuation of the tutorial on using drawing software. In our first example we looked at how to make a precise drawing using the rotate function. In this next tutorial we are looking at how to use a picture of the tatting as a basis for the drawing. This is an especially useful method if your design is asymmetrical like an oval, heart or butterfly.

The tutorial PDF is available on the Yahoo group web site. Your drawing can be added to the group Files in the DRAWINGS folder. You may choose to upload the DrawPlus drawing itself, but it would be better if you exported the drawing as a JPG and upload the JPG.

Pictures of the tatting you create from someone else' pattern can be uploaded to the Photo Album labelled Test Tatting.

Lesson 6

Writing out patterns can be the biggest chore when it comes to designing. What's the right format to use? How easy are my patterns to read? Are people going to by-pass my designs just because my instructions aren't clear? Or worse, am I going to get a reputation for crappy patterns just because my instructions aren't good enough? Let's face it, those or questions like those concern us all. Years ago people shared patterns without the benefit of pictures. There might have been a line drawing off in a corner, but most of the designs were long word things written with the idea that people needed to be able to figure out the whole thing from just the words.

The trouble is, in our society words change almost overnight and what you may think is perfectly clear, might be a jumbled mess to someone else. Take for example, a zigzag chain. Some people refer to it as a zigzag, some people call it RickRack, or ricrac, or sets, or set stitch, or Victorian sets. Which is correct? Who decides what is correct? The tatting police? Who are the tatting police? So which name do you choose to use in your pattern?

Where you have several options, your decision should be based on 2 things; first what is the most logical, and second what is the most widely accepted. So in the example above I would use zigzag, because it would be more clearly understood by more people, although for a long time people have commonly used RickRack in various spellings. For this reason I frequently use both terms.

Is one type of written pattern, better than another? I don't think so, although, it can be very difficult to follow a short pattern without a picture to reference. One of the objections I have to the short version is the + symbol used to denote a join doesn't tell you where you are joining to. In a small doily for example it can be presumed that + means join to a previous ring, but it might mean join to a previous row. If there is no picture, additional description is required to clarify. The more complex the pattern is, the more it requires additional description, sometimes making it as wordy as the long version. Wordy long version patterns where sections of the pattern are repeated in different rows can easily cause problems as you look away to tat and come back to the pattern where it’s repeated in a different area.

Whatever terms you use, or how you describe things, ultimately doesn't matter. What does matter is that people understand what you have written. So if you use a term that you think people may not understand, then a description of what it is and how you do it should be included at the beginning of the pattern.

In my opinion the best patterns are diagrammed or visual patterns. A good visual pattern doesn't need a picture for clarification, but making a GOOD diagram can take a bit of work especially when you are just starting. One of the new files uploaded to the Yahoo group page is the first part in a tutorial on using software to make a visual pattern. It has been based of Serif DrawPlus SE which is a free program, but the principles are the same for most drawing software. The first installment on the tutorial is 10 pages long and for that reason it won't be posted here but just in PDF format in the Yahoo shared files. You can copy it from there and keep it on your computer for future reference.

You will eventually use software to draw your own design and upload it to the FILES area
in the DRAWINGS folder. Do not upload just the base motif, wait until you have the complete drawing done.

In the interim you tatting homework is to test tat someone else's design and post it in the Photo Album labelled TEST TATTING