More Wire and Tatting Pendants

 

Vintaj® natural brass colored ParaWire, with floral style tatting of my own hand dyed thread. 

A burst of creativity resulted in 5 new necklaces added to my Etsy shop. I've decided that non-tarnish coated wire is the best choice for combining my tatting with wire-wrapping. It comes in a variety of permanent colors (obviously I love colors!) and no worries about tarnishing. Even Argentium silver eventually does tarnish and of course the silver is more expensive, so I won't likely be using it anymore. 

Bronze colored wire with hand dyed thread and nylon micro-macramé

Micro-macramé, or even a simple braided cord makes a nice color-coordinating finish for these projects and the sliding knot enables the necklace to be adjustable to any length. I like that the nylon cord is shiny and smooth, and tail ends can be melted with a lighter. 

Recently I've learned to be very careful with the lighter, as I had to re-do one neck cord because I accidently burned the wrong part. Didn't set myself on fire, though! ^_^

Titanium colored non-tarnish coated wire with hand dyed, white thread, and seed pearls.

2 colors of wire and 2 colors of cord

Tiny beads added during the wire wrapping. On the large focal bead I used a filigree bead cap from a "goodies bag" acquired at a long ago Tollway Tatters meeting. 

Free Tatting Pattern for a Dissent Collar

 

The only techniques used in this pattern are ring, chain, reverse work, picot, join, and lock join. 

Tat the top row across first, shown in gray on the diagram. Then continue tatting down and up for each narrow section. The picots between the narrow sections need to be gradually larger to enable the sections to fan out nicely.

I made mine using size 10 thread, but since this collar is worn like a necklace, the size doesn't really matter.

This is the quickest I have ever designed a tatting pattern - only 4 days from just a vague feeling I should design a pattern based on RBG's dissent collar, to a finished collar, to a sharable diagram.

Top row and a section in progress

Ruth Bader Ginsburg

Wearing My Jacket Embellished With Tatting

 Epic fabric art? A try anyway, and fun to do. The designs are my own, except the top round motif on back. That pattern is from Priscilla Tatting Book No. 3.

The bottom motif is from my new pattern "Daylily Dance". I sewed all the tatting on by hand using sewing thread to match the jacket color.

I also have an olive green cotton jacket that needs embellishing! That one will need a different color scheme. Plenty of uses for tatting, putting more creative beauty into the world, one knot at a time.