This week I asked my granny to teach me Tatting. This video shows my first tatting lesson, learning how to tension the working thread and make a knot that slips. Tatting seems to be a much less popular process than knitting, crochet and lace making, yet she learned it as a girl from a friend and remembers the stitches despite not picking up the shuttle and thread for some 60 years! It is a time consuming, decorative technique, not a craft of necessity, though it shares similarities with sailor's netting techniques and may have originated from here.Visually it also shares similarities with the studies of oceanic organisms which I recently re-discovered in my research collection. I have always been fascinated by the way that organic forms are mirrored throughout the natural world- a reminder that that life's blueprint originated from the deep blue sea.
My first chain of tatting.
Ernst Haeckel: from Radiolarian Atlas (Art forms of the Ocean) Germany, 1862
