At 11:53 PM 10/20/04 -0500, palmhaven wrote: >. . . I have never tried to tat with a >needle. Is it easier than with a shuttle.
"Needle tatting" and "tatting with a needle" are unrelated activities. When tatters were struggling to invent what bobbin lacers call "sewings" and tatters call "joins" -- no Arachne mailing list in those days, so they had to re-invent the wheel -- one early trick was to tat with a needle or a fine netting needle that could be passed through a picot. Tatting with a needle went out of style as soon as someone realized that you can draw a loop of thread through a picot and pass the shuttle through it, but like all obsolete techniques, tatting with a needle still has its uses. (I don't know what current tatters are doing with needles, but you should see what they are doing with false tatting, now called "split tatting".) (More precisely, a "split" chain or ring is half tatting and half false tatting.) Needle tatting, on the other hand, is a form of needle lace that can be worked in the air, without being couched down to a support. Stitches are cast onto a needle that is then used to draw a thread through the stitches to make chains and rings. If the stitches cast on are alternating half hitches, needle tatting can produce an exact duplicate of tatting, hence the name. The name is rather unfortunate, since it leads many needle tatters to restrict themselves to imitating tatting. -- Joy Beeson [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://home.earthlink.net/~joybeeson/ http://home.earthlink.net/~dbeeson594/ROUGHSEW/ROUGH.HTM http://home.earthlink.net/~beeson_n3f/ west of Fort Wayne, Indiana, U.S.A. where the sycamore somehow found a second batch of huge leaves to drop. - To unsubscribe send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] containing the line: unsubscribe lace [EMAIL PROTECTED] For help, write to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
