In Love with Karey's New Heart

The latest issue of Tatting Times from Karey Solomon is especially nice because it has this heart with four variations. I fell in love with it as soon as I saw it.  This is the last variation; trust me to always start with the hardest.

It still needs blocking, and I'm missing a couple of beads where I made a boo-boo, but I'm very happy with it.  I'll make some of the other variations later.

I tinkered a bit with the instructions, though not the stitches themselves.  Karey reminds us, rightly so, that post shuttles are better than bobbin shuttles for carrying lots of beads.  Her low stress approach to this pattern is to tell us to load a goodly number of beads on 2 shuttles and when one shuttle gets low on beads, do a SLT and switch shuttles. But you know I love my bobbin shuttles.  A careful analysis of the pattern showed most of the beads are on shuttle 2 if you don't switch.  Also, there are lots of lock joins, where a hook is so much better than the point of a post shuttle. So, I wound most of the thread and beads onto an oversized post shuttle (a SewMate was big enough) and used an Aero for shuttle 1 with just a few beads on it. I could have it both ways, happy dance.  Also, I noticed that most of the work is chains, or rings thrown off with the chain shuttle, so I began the first ring as though working on the back side, so that most of the time, I would be working on the front side.

I really recommend a subscription to Tatting Times, so you can find gems like this in your mailbox.  Many of the patterns eventually show up in her books later, so I'm looking forward to an exceptional future book as well.

Here are links to Karey's blog and her website.