Here's the Finger

The package I was waiting for yesterday did not arrive until about 7 in the evening, so I was as I had suspected left to my own devices. With the peer pressure mounting I decided to go forth and start the creation of my tatted gloves. Several other glove patterns exist, I've seen pictures, but rather that use them as a jumping off point I started elsewhere with my spine pattern. Sure a few people have offered great suggestions which I had considered. Just do the back side and sew them to existing gloves or why not just do opera length fingerless gloves. I thought about both of those options, but decided that I wanted to conquer those fingers.

Sure, if all this works there might be a much cheaper, I imagine, fingerless version, but for now were starting from the beginning. I also ran across someone asking how the designers mind works and while I didn't answer there, I thought about that a lot. Sure, there are those that truly understand the math involved in pattern creation. They sketch and run the numbers when they design. Me, not so much. I think that I might understand the math at a subconscious level, but it certainly does not ever come out to play on a piece of paper. More often than not my designs start with an idea which is often times very vague. Then I either imagine what existing designs might be married together, pull our scraps of lace to actually lay them together, or more often, I just start tatting and see what emerges.

I rarely scrap an idea. Usually the first thing off the needle wins. There are rarely adjustments or revisions to the original design and to make everything even more interesting, I almost never write down stitch counts while I work. I must take a zillion pictures and then I count stitches and hope I remember. Usually a pattern gets written down only after it has been created quite a number of times, or when someone asks real nice like.

I am digressing though, fingers. I wanted to show you fingers. I have all five on one hand done now, but I took pictures when I had only 4. I used my spine pattern which itself was adapting a one shuttle pattern to two adding a Celtic element. I played with the stitch counts to make each finger fit just so. I do need to make some slight adjustments to the length and then it is on to making them one. I can't help but think that I'm going about this a little backwards. I have knitted gloves and they go in the other direction, but it seemed only logical to me to conquer the fingers first. I thought about continuing this basic design throughout the length of the gloves, but I decided that had been done. All the tatted gloves I've seen do the strips method to create the glove. My current idea is to take one of my slave bracelet designs and figure out what need to be done to match the two together. I'm also toying with the idea of leaving the palm bare. I think it might be a striking look and besides warmth is clearly not what these suckers are designed for. I features some other gloves recently on the Wunderkammer that played with that negative space and it gave them a real avant garde feel.

Ooh, speaking of Wunderkammer, she has reached 300 followers. I wanted to celebrate, but I think I shall save all celebrations until the one year anniversary, since it is near the two year anniversary of this blog and my 4th etsyversary. Sure, we've got a few months to go on that but, look out, it's coming.