heartfelt design

Late Valentine's design, but evidence that I didn't forget that day! Happy late Valentine's Day!

Thanks to the online tatting designers' class, I've resurrected my Pinterest account creating a board with visual bookmarks to sites about the design process. I've read, re-read, read again. I've found many useful schematic, I'll try to use them. In all that impersonal analysis you get the basic, the core, of the matter. Then you must put your heart in. That's where all that reading took me to.

I started looking at others' hearts, then doodled all over my notebook's page, then went to the CAT. Just to let you know, CAT is my Computer Aided Tatting, I don't come back always to the same tool, I've a set and use them all. So, I had a beautiful symmetrical heart, then I started tatting prototypes. It took a little before I got a good shaped heart, but I had almost what I wanted.
I needed a break then.

That's the break: the most heartfelt design of a heart that you can ever find. My favourite tatted heart. Susan Fuller's design, there's her whole heart inside it, isn't it, the visual pattern is by Frivole here.

Thread is Lizbeth size 80, col. 154 "Wildflower Garden".

I came back to my design and tried to add "the heart", the emotional appeal, by adding picots, a little curled ring (it looks like another heart!), giving to chains the movement they didn't have in the CAT drawing. I feel it is more "mine" now, I don't know if you like it but I know that I put my heart in designing it.

There's a big dimpled ring though (60ds)! But for the faint of heart there's a tutorial here, I hope that it can help!

Ciao,
Ninetta

P.S. For many of you that are using Picasa, Google has "decided to retire Picasa over the coming months in order to focus entirely on a single photo service in Google Photos". Read more here: http://googlephotos.blogspot.com/2016/02/moving-on-from-picasa.html