Silhouette

When I do what I call "representational tatting"-- in other words, tatting that is supposed to represent something from the real world, like a flower or an animal-- I usually like to use colors appropriate to what I am making. This time, however, I decided to go with simple white. The dark green background of the satin ball visible in the negative space is obviously appropriate for holly leaves, but mainly I think this tatting is more of a silhouette, and I like the effect.

The holly leaf pattern is motif number 69 from The Tatted Artistry of Teiko Fujito. The pattern said to use three threads, but to be honest, I couldn't see why. I just used ball and shuttle, and I think it looks just like what's in the book.

The berries are just very tight spirals around very small rings-- make a ring of 1-1-1-1 and chain around it for two or three rounds.

I've ordered replacements for the two balls of thread that Squijum appropriated; they're really not salvageable. But you know how it is, if you just order two balls of thread the shipping costs almost as much as the thread, and that just seems silly. So I also ordered several balls of size 80, since my Lizbeth collection is very heavy on size 20 and light on size 80. Yeah, I spent more money just to make the shipping charge seem more reasonable-- and the online stores know we'll do that every time, too.