Ankhar Earrings

These earrings are based on Karen Cabrera’s basic ankhar tutorial #105. Karen’s videos are brilliantly made, even though they’re backwards. 

This is an elegantly simple design, made just with rings on a single shuttle. An 8mm bead is fixed to each earring as part of the finishing loop. 

Use the Larks Head join to keep everything smooth. Again Karen Cabrera is my go-to for this technique, I use the original #85. 

Use small, decorative sized picots. There needs to be enough room to allow two joins, but still keep everything in tight. 

Don’t tat in the end at the beginning, use it to secure the bead and tension at the end. 

R1: 16-8

R2: 10+10

R3: 8+8-8

Repeat R2 and R3 until there’s 5 of each

R11: 8+16

Cut the end long. Thread behind each front ring and through R1 to the back to cinch the curve down. Thread the bead on, loop over R11 and back through the bead. Tie to first thread and stitch in ends. The ends can also be threaded back through between the rings to give a little extra tension and height, and tied around the base of R11 then just snip off closely. Fix an earring hook around the final ring.

Make the second earring the same way. When finishing, make sure the rings overlap the other way around, and fix the earring hook to the other end.

Last year, I was attaching findings to picots. Unfortunately, the hooks I use seem to have too big of a gap to be securely attached to a mere picot and couple of my gifts wandered off by themselves. I've now taken to fixing the hooks around an entire ring, so there's no chance of them going anywhere and I don't have to worry about adding random picots.

The ankhar earrings pictured are made with #20 Milford Mercer in Black and 8mm glass beads. 

Super Rainbow Florets

I am completely enamoured with this Rainbow Lizbeth thread. Amazon makes the world a much better place. The colours work absolutely perfectly within this adaptation of Muskaan's Layered Extension of Simplicity.
Her post about central picots and This Way or Tat series is fantastic, and has a brilliant explanation of the central picot. For my long picot, I measured back 5 double stitches. Unfortunately, it doesn't disappear because the colours are just too awesome. These photos do not do it justice.

Work with shuttle and ball, preferably starting from a continuous thread. I tied one of these first, but I don't like the knot. Better to loop together to get started, then knot on the backside and thread the tails in.

R1: 8 long picot 8 (I measured back along my work 5 ds)
C1: 4-4
R2: 8+8
Join all of the rings to the central picot, I use larks head joins.
Repeat C1, R2 for a total of 8 rings, and a complete round of chains.

These could be so fun with some beads, but I was just enjoying the colours.



Pieces shown tatted with Lizbeth #20 in Rainbow Splash #184.

Classic Earrings

These earrings are based on the lovely Volta design from koronczarnia.pl. Apparently beads drilled to dangle aren't fashionable where I shop at the moment, so I use a triplet of seed beads at the bottom ring.

I prefer everything to look even and perfect so I generally work frontside. It's nice and easy with this pattern, just the chains are backside. Larks head joins make this super neat and make it sit nice and flat without blocking or hardening. That does mean the chain joins are upside-down, but it makes it a bit more fun.

Edit: These earrings were gifted to my Mum, who felt awful when she suddenly wasn't wearing one of them. I've since stopped joining the hook fittings to a single picot, as the lost earring flipped up and slipped out. I'd recommend making a small thrown ring instead of the small picot at the top, or omitting it altogether and looping the fitting around Ring 2.

1 shuttle + ball

9 seed beads, 1 centre bead

lbp - long bead picot

jp - tiny joining picot

sdp - small, decorative picot

JC# - join to picot on chain #

JR# - join to picot on ring #

JR#B - join to long picot on ring # with bead

(#beads) - move # beads to working loop

(#b) - make picot with # beads

CL - close loop 

RW - reverse work

3 seed beads on shuttle

R1: 5 lbp 8 jp 3 CL

R2: 3 JR1 7 sdp 7 jp 3 CL

R3: 3 JR2 8 lbp 5 CL

RW C1: 2 jp 8

RW R4: 4 JR3B 9 jp 1 CL

R5: 1 JR4 9 lbp 4 CL

RW C2: 8 jp 2

The next set is basically a repeat, just with the beads instead of the hanging picot and some different joins.

R6: 5 JR5B 8 jp 3 CL

R7 (3beads): 3 JR1 7 (3b) 7 jp 3 CL

R8: 3 JR2 8 lbp 5 CL

RW C3: 2 JC2 8

RW R9: 4 JR8B 9 jp 1 CL

R10: 1 JR9 9 JR1B 4 CL

RW C4: 8 JC1 2

Cut ends long, tie off. Thread one end through chain join, thread seed, centre, seed beads on and thread through other chain join. Thread back through beads and tie off.

The earrings pictured are worked in Milford #20 Royal Blue with size 12 seed beads and 6mm centre beads.