Tatted Mock HairPin Lace

I offered to test tat a pattern for the Online Tatting Class using Ruth Perry's Tatted Mock Hair Pin Lace (TMHPL) technique.  Now, I am not an accomplished tatter, but I do enjoy learning new techniques, so I decided to try Saundra Hameed's Angel pattern. It's supposed to look like this:

Isn't it pretty?





The pattern calls for creating a TMHPL strip, cutting and tieing,  and then later attaching to the head.

I wanted to avoid an extra cut and tie, so I decided to begin the pattern with the head, then create the MTHPL piece and complete the rest of the pattern in one go.

And the changes I made worked, but my angel looks like this:

slightly wonky

Why? Because my picots are not long enough. Had I followed the pattern, I would have realized early on that my picots were too short.
Doing the pattern in one go, and beginning with the head as I had done meant that by the time I reached the second wing, and discovered that it pulled it out of shape, I was almost finished the pattern. 

I should have stopped then, and started a new one, but, there's that stubborn streak...............and I was running out of time........


The TMHPL  creates an up and down picot, which resembles the hairpin lace. Having several lacemakers remark that the fancy picot (FP) stitch I often use looks like hairpin lace, I decided to try an experiment. The FP creates an alternating up and down picot.
Realizing that the TMHPL uses 3 half-stitches per picot, and the FP uses only two half-stitches, I added in an extra ds/set to create the same length.
The usual FP stitch is written thusly if d= 1st half of ds  and s= 2nd half ds,  - = picot
1ds (-2d-2s)x  where x is the total number of FP sets desired
and adapted it to:
1ds (-2d-2s, 1ds)x  and this way strengthened the FP mock hairpin lace strip, as well as matched the length of the TMHPL strip. I decided to test my theory by tatting Saundra Hameed's "Round Center Motif in Tatting and Hairpin Lace" Here's a pic of her example:

 It's a wonderful pattern.

 My result:


not perfect, but I think the FP as an alternative method  for TMHPL has possibility. I still need to work on my tension, and not tat so tightly.
Because I like to use the FP, and do so frequently in my tatting, it was quicker for me to tat this larger motif with the FP, twice, rather than the angel with the TMHPL once.





On my first attempt at the above pattern, I made a joining error, and this happy accident occurred:

a cute fan motif that may just find itself on a future CQ block




I hope all your tatting accidents are happy ones!
Thanks for visiting.
Hugs from Suz