Heart No 18! The end!

Yippee, this is the final heart that I am tatting from Martha Ess's book Tats Amore.

It has been a rollercoster ride of tatting from really easy beginner level hearts that look lovely....to absolutely stunning designs that I would put in the intermediate to advanced class.

This final one is a stunner. It is the Daisies and Forsythia Heart.

The other tats of this heart from Martha and from Gina (who test tatted this one) have had a white outline. So I wanted to see how it would look with a coloured outline. As I progressed I was not at all sure that I liked it but the final effect I do like.

I had better show it to you before I talk about it any more.



Remember the 3 daisies I had left from the previous heart ready for this one......well I obviously hadn't looked at the pattern for this one as the daisies are ever so slightly and very different!! My daisies have a picot on every petal ready for joining but there are some petals in this heart that float free withing the outline. Mmmmm I hear you say does that really matter...well this one is trying to be exhibition quality! so it does.

Then I find that the petals in one go clockwise and in the other anticlockwise!!

Clockwise seems to be my preference as I notice that the ones in my previous heart go in the opposite direction from Martha's one.

Martha gives directions for both the right and left daisies in her pattern but I find that the left one is a ...... to tat. Simply reversing the daisy doesn't work as the folded rings don't look the same on the reverse.
Finally I decide to tat my daisy using wrong side stitches and I get my result. Tho' I do seem to remember that I had to do a bit of quick thinking as well!!

Next comes the spray of Forsythia. That went well except for my making one teeny mistake...you can see it but I will show it to you later.

Then comes the outline of little flowers. That was easy enough too.

I made this heart to this point a few weeks ago and then left it till the very end.

Why? you ask. because this is the bit that I hate doing...making the stems. Partly because it's very fiddly and partly because I can't do it on my knee while watching TV.
If a pattern is too fiddly for this criterion, then I generally don't do it!

I have to do this sitting at the table with all my concentration focused on it. I needed to get the stems going in the right direction and get the lengths and resulting curves even. That is tricky.

As I tatted the first stem, the instructions said to join to the green ring of the forsythia spray. I didn't have a green ring!!!



I had a yellow ring as you can see on the center of the heart. Ooops, my mistake. Once I realised this I was flying again. I even got magic threads in them.

The stems look a real mess until they are blocked and you can get the whole shape right.
The ribbon hides my yellow ring, so no one will ever know.

So was it worth all the effort.....yes.

My Thread amounts

Daisy as for previous heart.

Forsythia spray... Yellow 3.5m, Green 1.75m

Outline...Sh1, 4m, Sh2, 3.5m.

Do I like this book of Martha's....nah!! no, no don't take any notice of that....of course I do. It has such a range of interesting patterns, that I haven't seen the like of before.

Now I have mastered them all, it's like completing a complex jigsaw. I know that I can make any one of them again, how much thread they will take and about how much time.

And I will.

What book will I do next??? Well my bookshelf is overflowing with tatting books. Some I have made quite a few patterns from, some none at all. Some are new and still being flipped through. Some are not suitable for this as the patterns are so varied. I like to do ones with a theme.

All are shouting....ME, ME, ME!!!!

All in good time I will make my way through another one as the feeling of satisfaction is terrific. But just not yet. You may not hear from me for a long time!!!!