My family is working on a variety of woodworking and other projects. I've been in a decluttering phase and haven't been making much myself, although I did use a little free time to play around with tatting.
I tried once or twice to learn tatting with a shuttle, but didn't get very far with it. Then some years ago I heard about needle tatting, but I never actually tried it until now.
I was following my needlework book's instructions for shuttle tatting, though, and didn't know about forming the stitches on the needle itself until I looked up this comparison of the two methods.
One attraction of tatting is that it produces a very sturdy lace, because every stitch is a knot.
The thing that makes it somewhat hard to learn is that the path that the thread needs to take to make a half-stitch is not the same as it takes in the finished stitch (except topologically, if you want to bring mathematics into it), because it needs to be pulled to "flip" the knot to the other thread, as they say in the link.
