Wedding Dress, Tatting - Part 2

More from the bottom of the dress front. This is two different sizes of beads couched down to form a double heart.

A tatted section with real pearls sewn down after the tatting was applied.

The back view. There is a lot of tatting on the train, which I will show another time.

The cuffs. The sleeves and upper bodice are net. I added a tatted edging and cut away the net to match the shape.

Above the net upper bodice, there is a neat silk collar. The bottom edging is a tatted chain pattern worked with lots of beads so it looks more like a solid piece of beading than a piece of tatting. The 'flowers' are pearls and beads.

More next time!



Wedding Dress, Tatting, Part 1

This is the wedding dress I made. The photos I had of it were not very good so I got it out, after 10 years in a box, to take photos. Sorry, but I was not going to iron it first! Getting it out and repacking it took long enough. So it is a bit crumpled.



Even the lowest corset that I could find still showed slightly at the back.



So I added some tatting to the relevant area and, in wear, it blended successfully into the tatting on the edge of the dress.

This is the panel at the bottom front of the dress.

And here is the upper motif from that section. I sewed the pearls on after the tatting.

More next time!



Wedding Veil - Tatting

Following on from the last post, here is the headdress for the full length veil. I used a combination of tatted flowers with artificial stamen centres, and beaded tatting made up into flowers.

Her is a view with more of the veil showing. The bride it was made for has dark hair so it looked very pretty.

Here is the edging I made. The veil was very long as it went with a dress with a train so I felt I was tatting for ever! I used a pattern that was all chains (one of Mary Konior's) to reduce the number of joins I needed to make.



Ring Pillow and Wedding Garter

Here is a little beaded ring pillow I made about 10 years ago. At the time it was a kit from a very small firm, but I'm afraid I no longer remember the details. It has beads and sequins worked on white silk and I think it looks very pretty.

One thing, I don't know when ring pillows became fashionable, or where they came from. When I was married 30 years ago in Japan, the pastor placed our rings in his open Bible for the wedding, which I thought was very nice.

This is the tatted wedding garter I made at the same time. It is the 'something blue'. For those from a different tradition, I grew up with the little rhyme that says a bride should wear, 'something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue.'

I had several atempts before I achieved a garter I felt happy with. The edging is my favourite one, which I have used for so many years that I no longer know where it came from, maybe Mary Konior, or it may be a traditional one.

I also made little tatted flowers and sewed them down with a pearl in the centre. I think this version works well.



Crochet

It is a long time since I have been able crochet as my wrists have lost the ability to turn as required due to arthritis. So I only have pictures from my albums of a few of the things I made down the years.

I did a good deal of crochet work when I was living in Japan, not least because at the time the bookshops there were full of books of crochet patterns. It was hard to know which to choose.

When I learned to tat though I did feel I preferred that to crochet because it was less vulnerable to damage. Break a thread in crochet work and the whole thing is apt to unravel. In tatting this does not happen so the repair is simpler.



More log cabin quilts

This quilt was the result of a mistake. I used to buy fabric remnants mail order, which meant no pictures, just a written description of the fabric. This could be misleading as what is in the reader's mind is not always what the writer was thinking. Mostly I got what I was expecting but this one was different. Once I saw it, I could see what the description had meant but it was a very difficult fabric to explain. And it certainly would not do for what I had intended.

After some thought, I decided that the pattern would look a lot better cut up small, so I added a cream fabric and a bit of bright yellow for the borders, and turned it into a quilt.

It's a good many years since I made it, but I still really like it. The fabric, which had been full of huge, screaming, floral motifs, really did look startlingly better when cut up and rearranged.

This bed topper is a different rearrangment of the same off-centre block. But I am not nearly as fond of this version. Somehow it looks spiky and aggressive to me.  It reminds me of barbed wire! I like the colours though.



More from my dollshouse

Happy New Year (to those whose new year falls on the first of January!)

Here are some more of the occupants of my dollshouse. I particularly enjoyed making the miniature bears and other animals.

There are little bits of miniature tatting on the tables. The problem there is finding a fine thread strong enough to be able to pull up the rings without the thread snapping.

In the background there are some pictures, a miniature sampler on silk gauze and, to the right, one of the miniature drawings that my husband did for me to frame for the dollshouse.

For the girl in blue's doll I used a 1/24th scale baby doll. The knitted doll was quite an undertaking, being so small.