90% Backwards

I learnt to tat from YouTube, a great beginner series by Esther.

90% of general folk are right handed, as are 100% of the good tatters on YouTube. So I did it right handed too, terribly awkwardly, until I understood the basic stitches well enough to mirror it and work the right way around, with the shuttle in my left hand and loom on the right. 

Then the fun really started. 

No pattern worked. The rings wouldn’t face the right way and never lined up to connect to the next picot properly. Chains stuck out the wrong way and upside down. Every join I had to turn the whole piece around. 

When everything is worked in circles, it really does matter which direction you go. Working left-handed means each ring is formed anti-clockwise, and the next element starts to the left of the last. Most patterns out there are worked clockwise from left to right. 

Here is a rare left-handed pattern from a Russian site I haven’t figured out how to translate.

All of the patterns I have worked and put up here are written out like this, to be worked anti-clockwise, from right to left. Hopefully I can help save someone from the brain-knarl of getting halfway through a pattern and not knowing which way is up anymore!