Blocking Tatting

As lovely and delicate as tatting, and especially picots, can be, they can also be frustrating at times. If you have ever had to wash your tatting, stored it long term, or inherited tatting, you know that those lovely lace loops can get twisted every which way, and be nearly impossible to iron out flat. Also, you can run into this problem when you are starting out tatting, and are still working on figuring out even thread tension, or when making large or extra large picots.

A good way to undo the curly, twisty, loops that result, and to save your sanity (if your picots are doing this, than you know what I mean!) is to "block" them. Blocking with or without stiffening, is a good method to use to relatively rapidly, get your tatting looking beautiful and resting flat and elegantly again, as it should be.

It can also be useful to use stiffeners to help some tatting projects keep their shape. For info on stiffeners see the article post entitled “Stiffening Tatting.”

Video Tutorial:

*If at any point this video is moving too fast for you, and you would like to take it slower, and get a better look at what I just did or follow along, YouTube has a video speed adjuster/slow motion setting, that is great to make use of.