Saturday, January 24, 2009

2 Shuttle Tatting Tutorial: Floating Rings

This is #3 for the 25 motif challenge.
Tatted in size 20 Apricot Mousse hand dyed silk tatting thread.


You can take a pattern that is normally a shuttle and ball thread pattern and turn it into a two shuttle pattern (in lieu of ball thread you use another shuttle).
Why would you want to do this?
Well it opens up some options like "floating" rings.

Take the above motif for example: Half of the motif is tatted in the regular way (shuttle = rings, ball thread = chains, tat a chain, do NOT reverse work, tat a ring, do NOT reverse work, tat another chain and you get a nice pointy effect).

The other half is tatted by the "thown off" or "floated" ring method.

This concept is easier to demonstrate by using two different color threads.


Shuttle #1 = Yellow thread (Ring)
Shuttle #2= Red thread (Chain)

To "throw off" or "float" a ring you simply use your chain shuttle (#2 in this case) to make your ring instead of using your ring shuttle (#1).

Once you understand and utilize this 2 shuttle tatting method you can "tweak" patterns to suit your personal taste. Pointy verses Round, also if you tat with two different colors you can have control over the placement of your color in pattern.

Another thing to think about is which direction the top your chains are facing. This does make a difference in the shape of your end product. How do you do this? Please visit my Turn Work VS. Reverse Work tutorial.


For future reference all my tutorials can be located in my side bar to the right.

Happy tatting!

7 comments:

Unknown said...

Your apricot mousse HDT is pretty.

Ratmomma / Carolyn said...

I'm glad you shared this tutorial. I recently learned this technique and it is one of my favorites!

Tattycat said...

This is a very informative tutorial and the apricot mousse silk thread is so pretty!

Bonnie said...

Thank you, Sherry!

Review Daddy said...

Cool!

Annie P said...

This is my first ever message left on a Blog. Have no idea what I am doing so we will see what happens here. I wanted to know if anyone can tell me where to find a demonstration or how to instructions for tatting with more than two shuttles. I am a beginning tatter. I saw your you tube video and it looks like you are tatting with about sic different shuttles. I didn't know that was possible.

LadyShuttleMaker aka MadMadPotter said...

Hi Annie,
Thank you for stopping by. My newest book has multi shuttle tatting in it. There really is no end to the number of shuttles you can use in tatting.
http://www.etsy.com/listing/95241572/branching-encapsulation-tatting-pattern