Most of these Tutorial have been added to our new MSN Group Site: The Social Shuttle, please check there for lots more help using the Shuttle.    You have always wanted to do Tatting with the Shuttle, but it was so hard to learn and most of the directions were so hard to follow and understand. And if your like me I could never understand what they were talking about with the infamous Flip of the thread. Well before you go out and buy a shuttle, lets learn to do this with just a two foot piece of thread and our hands. If you already have a shuttle and need to follow along thats fine, I hope this helps. These are practice examples to start us out learning the first half and the second half of the Double Stitch, and how we get that thread to Flip over to the other thread to make them.  I am adding a few more pages as time permits, on some other techniques to help you get started. Once you have some of these techniques down a bit, you can surf the links I have added to help you out also. Since this is a exercise on this you can use one thread in one color and knot another color to it. This way you can actually see the flip of the thread to better understand what we have to do. Now keep in mind normal shuttle tatting is, wrapping the thread onto the shuttle and working off the shuttle. Working off the shuttle is just making rings. If your making rings and chains then the thread is wrapped onto the shuttle from the ball and you would use the shuttle and the ball thread, or two shuttles in most cases.   Try following these in order will be helpful, look them all over but try to take it one step at a time, and if you have any problem with any of these please leave us a message and we will help anyway we can. For the right handed Tatting. In exercise page one, we will just be doing ds=double stitch to make a ring, to help you learn the Flip.  For Left hand Tatting with the FingerTatting/Shuttle, learn the basic how to make the double stitch and the dreaded flip of the threads.    How to make picots and joining to picots on the other rings using just the shuttle thread.  On this page it will give a little more help on the joins. This will also help with understanding the traditional way of tatting and the front side/back side tatting. The question is do we do the up join or the down join. Making chains and how to reverse work, using the shuttle and ball thread. How to use the SLT (Shoe Lace Trick) working with two shuttles and two colors of thread. The split ring, an advance technique but very helpful to learn when doing a pattern to help climb out from one ring to another.   Here is a list of some of my favorite web sites to visit and get some basic tatting help from. Some have pictures and some just text but great reading and learning material. Some also have advanced shuttle techniques so it would be a good idea to bookmark them for future use in learning more about shuttle tatting. If you need to learn the tatting terms/symbols they are the same for shuttle and needle, you can   for the tatting terms.

After learning some of the basics, and you decide this is something you would like to do you might want to buy a cheap shuttle or make one to practice more with. It would be helpful to you to have something to better understand the feel of using a actual shuttle in your hand. For the more advanced techniques you would need two shuttles, as for working the slt (shoe lace trick) 
If you do not have a shuttle and would like to try it with a homemade shuttle here are a couple idea's. Yes I have actually used these, they are great for practice and learning new techniques. This way you can just add a few yards of thread to practice with and do not have to use up or keep tying new thread to the shuttle.

LOL, here is the Super Duper Handy Dandy Shuttle. This was made with the cardboard from a large ball of thread, cut out a couple grooves to wrap the thread on, and make a slit on the side to put the thread in to keep it from un-winding.  You may want to try putting the notch's on the sides and round out the ends, so it does not catch on the thread as your passing it back and forth.

Yes you guessed it, it is a bread wrap off a loaf of bread. It's small but great for practice/learning and for that second shuttle when needed. You will have to make a notch in the end to wrap the thread, use wire clippers are a old pair of scissors. And please wear glasses or something to cover your eyes, in-case the bits should fly. Try not to make it to far up as it may crack the plastic. There is no need to add a notch to hold the thread as the top part is close enough together to keep it from unwinding.