I learnt to make shuttle lace from my German grandmother, who lived in the area between Osnabrück and Bielefeld. She came very rarely to visit my parents home in Switzerland, where I grew up in the canton of Berne. My first attempt in tatting resulted in a decorative border for a white cotton handkerchief. I then did a row of crochet all around the four sides of the handkerschief and then attached the tatted chain with rings and loops to these crochet stitches. The white cotton thread was the thinnest available at the time, the thickness of a sewing machine thread. At school, making shuttle lace was not part of the needlework curriculum (despite four compulsory lessons per week for all girls for nine years). 

I have kept the shuttles made of horn from the 1960/79s to this day. After the 2000s one could purchase plastic shuttles online from China. Today, tatting is experiencing a boom again in the USA, Asia und Eastern Europe, as yu can buy cheap patterns for pointsettias or other decorations online. International tatting groups have formed on Facebook. Old tatting textbooks are being sold on online platforms. In India, a new edition of a 100-year-old German pattern book for tatting is being planned! Of course, these opportunities have invited me to learn frivolité (as I prefer to call it) in more depth again and to try out new techniques with new possibilities (such as working with beads).


Dedicated women from the USA, Italy and India published tutorials on YouTube to show certain tatting techniques and offer help for interested beginners. Interpreting old patterns and last but not least the digital recording of your own creations of patterns may be quite a challenge. 


As cotton handkerchiefs are hardly used any more and poinsettings are only in seasonal demand, I was looking for a way to combine shuttle lace with coloured fabrics or a combination with other materials. Mixed media means that a new artistic creation emerges with a suitable mixture of fabrics, paper, beads, wire, thread and more. Designing in form, colour and material gives me pleasure and provides always new impulses in the process itself.
Ulrike Klauser
Rotbuchstrasse 44
8600 Dübendorf
ulrike.klauser@bluewin.ch
076 343 05 46