Showing posts with label pansy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label pansy. Show all posts

Wednesday, April 4, 2012

Pansy hair clip


 The vintage pansy pattern from page 20 of  the Dover "Tatting Patterns" book by Sanders, which is a reprint of "The Priscilla Tatting Book #2" first published in 1915. I finished this as a hair clip for myself.

While deciphering the old pattern I wasn't sure what to do with the center, since it said to "carry threads to next picot in ring", so I opted to do a lock join with the shuttle thread at the next picot and then brought the ball thread under and started the next chain. This left some bare thread showing, but that can't be seen at all now that the petals are all finished.

I added some beads over picots in the round before the yellow outline. To determine how big the picot needed to be in order for the bead to fit on it with room to join, I tested one picot with the bead, took the bead off, and then observed how big that picot was. So all the other picots that I intended to place a bead over later, I tried to make about that size. I didn't measure or use paper clips or anything, that would have been way too much trouble for the number of picots needed.

The yellow center beads were sewn on afterward using some thread ends left from tatting the flower. The leaves and nylon net were also sewn on with thread ends. No process to share about that, I just sort of  kept sewing until it all seemed like it would hold together. The clip is the sort that will stay in my hair, larger clips are too heavy for me.

The threads used were all size 20, and the finished pansy flower measures about 2 and 1/2 inches (6.4cm).

Thursday, March 29, 2012

Pansy

A new batch of "Pansy" thread, hand dyed by me. In this photo I've started tatting the pansy motif from the Priscilla Tatting Book #2, a vintage book in public domain. If you go to http://www.georgiaseitz.com/public/publicindex.html and scroll down a bit, the link to the book is on the right hand side. There are a lot of vintage books listed there! Other online archives have vintage patterns for free, too.

I didn't have time to finish the pansy before getting the hand dyed thread listed on Etsy, but I hope to get it finished into some sort of hair ornament by Easter. Most likely I'll use a solid color around the outside edge. For now I'm just following the pattern as given, the best I can. It occurred to me that there could be some improvements by replacing the center ring with a self-closing mock ring and having the petals as floating rings from that, but I'm not sure. I need to finish this one first in order to understand how the basic pattern works.