Tatting - Lesson 3

Well, this lesson took a little longer. More rings to make, plus this wasn't like #2. This was more like #1, where you have to practice to know what to do, it's not just seeing how things look. It's numbers, which I love. I will admit, this lesson I think ended up being a matter of tastes and opinions in a lot of fellow classmates homework. Some of us had the same ring sizes, but ended up with different chain numbers. Tension, appearance, and what is straight came into play in many different ways. Here is my version:

Here we were to make a clover leaf (a three ring shape where all rings are the same size) and figure out what length of chain we would need between each clover leaf. We were to use our rings sizes from the first lesson for comparison. I tried different variations.
Top Left: R(4-/+4-/+4-4) Ch(4-4-4-4) Too short.
Bottom Left: R(4-/+4-/+4-4) Ch(4-4-4-4-4-4) Too long
Top and Bottom Right: R(4-/+4-/+4-4) Ch(4-4-4-4-4) Just perfect. (ran out of thread on the top one and had to begin again.




Here is a close up of the final version.




Here we were suppose to make a trefoil (3 ring shape with different sized rings) and figure out how the chain length would change. This one was harder than I thought.
Top Left: R(4-2-/+2-4), R(4+4-4-4), R(4+2-2-4) Ch(4-3-3-4) My first mistake here was making the joining points too high on the smaller rings, it make the rings pull upward, instead of horizontal. The chain length wasn't right either, it was too short. I had figured since the first part of the lesson needed 1.25 of the bottom rings, so would this one. Wrong.
Middle Left: R(2-4-/+4-2), R(2+6-6-2), R(2+4-4-2) Ch(4-4-4-4-4) Here I lowered the joining point and lengthened the chain to 20, like the one first part of the lesson. But I felt it was too long and I didn't like the way all the picots bunched up.
Bottom Left: R(6-/+4-2), R(2+5-1--1-5-2), R(2+4-6) Ch(6*1-1--1-1*6) I changed the picots around here to be closer and less chaotic. Chain length was also changed 16. I felt this was closer, but the joining picots still weren't quite right.
Right Side: R{(10*2) first time and (6+4*2) afterward}, R(2+5-1--1-5*2), R(2+4*6) Ch(6-4-6) I changed the joining picots to tiny picots, but still felt like the chain was close but not there, so the last two chains have Ch(6-6-6), which ended up being just perfect.




Here is a close up of the last one. You can see how those two extra stitches in the last two chains make it look better.





Immensely enjoyed this lesson, but it was quite time consuming.

Key
- Regular size picot
* Tiny picot
-- Large picot
+ Join
-/+ Picot or join, depending on where in the design