Ok, so the tassel former pattern is technically called:
Simple warp wrapping over a circular weft.
Now that sounds really scary, and what I say is, forget about that, its just jargon, techno babble, knot theory blah.
Forget also that it ‘looks‘ really, really hard to do, and just let yourself drift....
Go right back in time.... to when when people couldn’t read.
(I’m not being disrespectful when I say even one of a Henry VIII’s wives couldn’t read, I think it was JS...)
So it went, all the way up, from field hands to nobility.
So, what do you do with that mindset : you copy!
Think visually, have a fiddle and copy.
So, what are we actually looking at here:
Starts small, ends up much bigger. Must mean adding more threads.
How to do that invisibly: use Larks Head Knot. See next picture...
The tassel formers have up to 55 threads going round at their widest point.
Now here’s the really fascinating drum roll part:
There are two stitches.
Only two!
One pulls to the right.
The other pulls to the left.
What looks really difficult to us now, was actually very simple then, but made to look like it was insanely complex, rather like the long tradition of knots and interlacing.
So, the thing that takes the longest is rigging up your ‘fixed point’ and sitting on the correct side of it so that you can turn the work the right way.
This sounds simple, but um.....you also need to turn the work upside down beforehand......That is the biggie. Only that. Handy that we have two eyes in our heads to watch that the right side is worked tho’....!!
The right side of Larks Head Knot is a perfectly smooth imitation of the stitch you are using.
Larks head the wrong side is horrid, truly truly horrid....do you see the ridge across the front, this is NOT what you want to see in this context, ever...
Then, once you get going, it’s very very fast.
Here is my modus operandi.....fixed point being cellotaped weft to table.
Yes it's all around, isn't it?
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