A tiny tale.

Now for something completely different..if this isn't the most exquisite thing you have ever seen then............

It all started when I asked my tatting group what they would most like to tat. This triggered an immediate response from one friend as she produced Rebecca Jones's Complete Book of Tatting and said 'this bootee even if only to use as a pincushion.'

Now tatting baby's bootees is just not my scene! but everything is worth trying ONCE!

Took a look at the book (that we all have). The bootee in the photo looked pretty, the diagram looked like a nightmare. Looking at a flatenned bootee is a bit like looking at the world on Mercators projection...hugely distorted!

The tatting is actually very easy..only one split ring and for most of it every picot is separated from the next by 2 stitches so that's easy to remember.

She says that all picots are normal size so you have to look past the distortion. But what is normal size??

The headache for me was in joining one round to the next as I am very bad at upside down,standing on your head,back to front stuff and the diagram was not a great help. In fact it took me until the third bootee to get it right and amend the diagram so that joining was easy to see. Now I don't have to contort myself to fit my final chains into a tight space and end up having to do unflipped chains to get them in at all.

The most important thing to strike me (and it wasn't until I was part way through) was the sudden realisation that the bootee I was tatting bore no resemblence to the photo in the book!! I had expected that the photo would be the bootee that I was making...but no not so!

My first trial was in a very light salmon Flora 20 using normal sized picots, it is full of mistakes and missed joins but by the time it was stffened and blocked and had a ribbon threaded through the rings it looks divine.

Mmmm normal sized picots...well it seemed to me that a baby's bootee needed to be very very frilly and so my picots became a lot bigger and so did my bootee!

I ended up making my trial and then two complete pairs in white Coats Mercer 20......oh you just can't beat white for some things can you. One pair is pretty good and the other is damn nigh perfect..every picot measured, just one little misplaced picot to show that it really is hand made.









The longer picots made quite a difference to the finished size.


This is to show you how pretty the motif on the front is with it's overlapping rings and long chains.



Sorry but I couldn't stop taking photos of this achievement! This is real old fashioned heirloom stuff. Except that I looked through all my Tatting books and all my archival stuff and could find plenty of bonnets but no bootees until quite recently. Anyone have any comments on this?


Don't they send little shudders down your spine! and well there might even be another reason for tatting bootees!!!!!!!!!!!

Now to get back to real tatting...in vibrant HDT! nuff of this white stuff.