Tatting ... or frivolite

Since my mother gave me a tatting shuttle, some threads and some tatting she had done (see the blog earlier this month) I have been looking at tatting. And I have ordered some new shuttles for the website and am looking at threads too.

So what is tatting? Well I will start by passing on the introduction from  'Learn to Tat' from J & P Coats of Paisley in Scotland, which is undated but looks very '50s to me.

I love the models matching nails and lipstick!








So here is the introduction:

Frivolite is the charming name that the French, with their nice sense of the apposite, give to the needlework we know as 'tatting' - and a very much more appropriate word it is! The art of tatting seems to have originated on the Continent where an early form of it was very popular in the elegant, second half of the eighteenth century and, when it crossed the Channel, prim English ladies possibly considered that the adoption of the Continental title might provoke unseemly misunderstanding. Certainly 'Miss Emma is at her frivolity' would have sounded an altogether indecorous statement to an early Victorian mamma - and so tatting it became; but tatting is hardly descriptive of the exquisite, frothy result a good needlewoman produces with the little instrument called a tatting shuttle.

It was the Victorians, about a hundred years ago, who first revived the art and considerably improved the process of working. The great Mrs Beeton, who died in her twenties, having produced her monumental treatise on Household Management when scarcely more than a girl, also planned a comprehensive book on needlework, and she considered the subject of tatting so important as to devote the first considerable section to it. This book, completed by other experts, was published after her death.

After the first world war, however, all things Victorian, good, bad or indifferent were lumped together and classed as 'stuffy'. As a result many fine needlework arts were forgotten, until a few years ago women began to rediscover what might be called the more feminine handicrafts. So it was, that about the time when the so-called 'new look' began to turn the fashion world upside down, tatting, one of the most enchanting of such handicrafts, was revived and began to enjoy a new lease of life. As one would expect, it was smart Frenchwomen who first saw the many exciting possibilities of tatting for present day use but they were speedily followed by the fashionable in England and America, and this fascinating form of needlework is now being used to glamorise clothes as well as household linens of all kinds. Tatting has become, for the third time in a hundred and fifty years, a modish pastime and it looks likely to be an enduring vogue - as it deserves to be. It is a simple enough process and, with practice, proficiency comes quite soon even to the not so neat fingered: considering the elaborate effect obtained this is decidedly gratifying. 

A modish pastime indeed - I can't wait to get started!



Here are a few more pictures from 'Learn to Tat'.