Jenn asked, “They say when you make the double knots while tatting, that if done right the knots should be able to move on the shuttle thread, but mine doesn’t do that. When I pull the st after flipping it, I don’t pull it really tight?”

At some point, every new tatter asks how tight their stitches should be, and most of my students have erred on the side of too loose, like this:

Do you see the spaces between stitches, and how loose they are on the working thread? Here is a comparison to stitches with a set of nice, comfortably tight stitches.

So how tight should your stitches be? Ideally, your stitches should be fairly tight around the working thread, but not so tight that you can’t pull the working thread through.

However tight or loose your stitches are, the main thing is that they are consistent in tension.

What are your questions? Email them to me or leave them in the comments and I’ll answer them as well as I can.

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