Norma’s Card Table Cloth

I have long liked this pattern and idea of Norma Benporath, to include tatted motifs of the card suits in a table cloth (in “Every Woman’s complete guide to tatting illustrated”). When I first saw the pattern when I got this book I thought it would be nice to have the ‘correct’ colours for the card suits and inlay them into a cloth. I knew I wouldn’t have the patience to complete the border as designed here, so was happy to just have the card motifs in a smaller table cloth.

Recently Jon test tatted the same motifs from the TROVE site. Her great efforts can be seen here.  The link to the TROVE pattern is here.  This reminded me about them again. I was between projects so loaded up a shuttle with red thread, fired up the i-Pad and followed the links from Jon’s blog to the TROVE pattern. As with any pattern that is new to me, it took several reads and a bit of retro tatting, when what I expected wasn’t the way Norma had written it.  After an hour or so I realised how many times I was checking the i-Pad, and trying to scroll the pattern on this digital interface was getting annoying, so I put it down for the night.

The next night I got my Norma book (above) out of my tatting cupboard and sat down again to continue the Heart motif. It was then I noticed something interesting…the stitch counts are slightly different for some sections. I can only guess that copyright for the newspaper articles didn’t transfer to the book easily, so patterns were slightly adapted to accommodate this. I found this fascinating and have cross checked the patterns for all motifs in this piece. There are variations, often 3ds is changed to 4ds, and picot counts are the same. I wonder if anyone else has found this with other patterns between TROVE and any printed copies you may have?

I hope to finish these motifs this week and have found fabric in my stash to make the cloth with. One of the things I like about the vintage tatting books is they give quite clear measurements and directions to guide the cutting of fabric to give the best visual results…takes out the guesswork for a novice sewer like me 🙂 It will probably take a few weeks to find the time to unpack the sewing machine…but I hope to have this project completed in the near future and will show you all the finished results 🙂

Next week’s blog is about my Royal Melbourne Show Entry for this year, with images of the entry components and descriptions of each piece.

See you then

Happy crafting

Fiona T