I thought that with the Christmas season upon us it would be a good idea to talk about designing snowflakes and tatting patterns as people very often create a flood of new designs during this period. It's never easy to talk about designing things as design is all too often associated with drawing and complex draughtsman tools - but the tools you will need to design tatting are much more simple. I keep to hand a good quality fine pointed pen - often my fountain pen or one of the fine felt tipped pens will do the job just fine - and a pad of graph paper. It doesn't matter what size though the smallest, which is in millimetres, is a little fine for our purpose - you want to be able to see it. I usually find I can cram several designs onto one A4/letter sized sheet so you don't need an enormous sheet or a huge pad with two hundred sheets either. If you really have difficulty drawing ovals you might also want to check your local stationery store for a template and some French curves to help you draw clean lines.

Of course if you prefer you can just use your computer, I like to use Jasc Paint Shop Pro - you can get a free trial version here which lasts for 60 days, but you can also use Microsoft Word quite easily - just go to Tools-Customize and select the Drawing toolbar, it contains all you need. Mary Konior keeps a small box with bits in it which she plays with to find new designs and you can do that too with your mistake pieces if you like. It's entirely up to you what method you use.

The next stage is thinking of your design - and this is not always easy, particularly with snowflakes. There are well over 100 patterns for snowflakes on the Internet and many more in books, so it is not easy to come up with something which has not been done before. It's a good idea to stay away from the simple, obvious shapes which come up with each technique. Most of the single shuttle ones have been explored pretty thoroughly and you will need to move into split rings, picot techniques, two shuttle tatting and other areas to produce something which is completely original now.

I start more complex designs by producing the pattern for one point of the snowflake. Once this basic design template has been produced you need to think about other things. How many points do you want your snowflake to have? People will call stars with eight, nine or twelve points snowflakes but in fact true snowflakes have six points, stars with other numbers of points should be considered motifs, stars or medallions.

At this stage I'm not thinking too carefully about how many picots I'm going to have I'm just drawing circles and loops to form chains and placing joins on the paper. I usually leave planning picots and more complex joins until I'm actually tatting and I've thought through the route for making the lace. The graph paper is great for helping those like me who are challenged with a plain sheet place things evenly which is why I use it. Blobs round the rings and chains do well for imitation beads and helping me to plan where the beads will be needed in the final pattern. Remember to bring the centre of the snowflake into the equation as you will want some way for the points to join to one another round the centre.

Starting tatting is another matter. I can spend hours considering which thread to use - they all have slightly different textures and finishes depending on which effect you want. You might also decide at any stage in the designing to use beads and if you do you will need to think about placement and numbers. You'll also want to consider any picot techniques you might want to use.

A great deal of thought has already gone into your design and you are now ready to do the tatting. Quite often I find I will work more complex designs several times and I find I learn a great deal about the relationship of the thickness of the line formed by the stitches in relation to picots, positioning and what will work in a design at this stage. Remember that the tatting line of stitches is quite thick and if you draw a very crowded design you might not be able to fit everything together. You will as you are tatting want to consider the kinds of joins you will use to create an effect and whether you want rings to stand completely free for example, or you want them to be held in place by a join. Never be afraid to abandon something and start over if it's not quite working and you see a different way which might work.

Last of all I would like to share with you something Pam Palmer said in a lecture at the East Anglian Tatting Day on 21^st September 2002. She was talking about design and space and she said "Always leave space for the butterflies". It's also important to consider the impact of negative empty space in your design - don't fill every possible part of your tatting design with thread and beads, leave space so that people can see the pattern.