dirty, already!

White and silk it's not a wise choice, it's already dirty, despite I always wash my hands before picking it up.
I like it and the pattern it's demanding but very addictive, I haven't tatted anything else in 5 days.

The dotted line is the growing direction for the pattern, it grows one triangle at a time, but at the end of every triangle I should decide what to do: the next triangle will double the size (and the time to tat it!). I'm lucky, very few mistakes till now.

Do you imagine that with some layered flowers? And a fringe with little shining beads? They can be added later, there's a ton of tatting to do before I reach a little shawl's size!

The idea of layered flowers come to me from a lace that I absolutely love, the Venetian needle lace, but I can't do it. When we went to Venezia, last summer, we didn't go to Burano (it's an hour from Venezia) for lack of time but I bought a booklet with a bit of that lace history and many pictures. I visited  Burano in 1995, at least I managed to go there once! I've had some opportunities to see the lace in person, for example last year in Zagarolo (I talked about it here in the blog: http://ninettacaruso.blogspot.com/2015/05/trapped-in-repetitions.html). I remember there is a piece also in Modena (north Italy) at the "Palazzo dei Musei" (a building from XVII c. that is itself a piece of art). I also bought a catalog there, many years ago (I found a review of that: http://www.annatextiles.ch/book_rev/rev2003/r2003gand/r2003gan.htm). In fact in Modena there's a unique collection with many cut pieces of handmade lace and fabric, collected during the second half of 1800, when the industry started to compete with artisans in patterns and techniques. Many fragments are clearly cut by scissors because industry owners used to exchange samples. If I remeber well, and I should check again into the catalog, just to be sure, there is no one piece of tatting.

I'm so sorry that the picture of the back cover of the booklet it's not as clear as I hoped!

Ciao,
Ninetta