It’s a good idea to keep your tatting items together in a container of some kind so that you can access them at a moment’s notice. But what are the essential items needed for your workbasket?

First of all you will need your tatting shuttle and/or needle. Most tatting shuttles are small enough to be very portable and needles can be stored in sweet tubes or similar objects once thoroughly washed.

Crochet hooks are also essential even for the needle tatter. Although many needle tatters just use the tip of the needle to hook the thread through the picot for joining if required, a crochet hook will be essential for joining very small picots and very useful for sliding beads onto picots.

I like to keep a reel of sewing thread, not the very finest but about 40 weight, for pulling through the stitches as magic threads. Quilting thread and fishing line can also work well for this.

A set of measuring gauges is also very handy as from time to time it is essential to measure picot length or the distance between rings when working rings only on a bare thread. Measuring gauges can be made very cheaply from patchwork template plastic and even from old well washed milk bottles, using a ruler and pencil to mark lines on the plastic so that you can ensure correct width measurement of the gauge before you cut it.

I like to keep a couple of packets of beads in my tatting workbasket - you never know when you will want to incorporate beads into your work and the little jars with lids on top are great because you can use the lids to hold a few beads to avoid having beads rolling about everywhere.

Scissors of course are essential and I find the best size is the 4 inch/10 cm embroidery scissors with sharp points. Keep them for cutting thread and don’t let your family use them for anything else.

I keep a couple of packets of sewing needles handy for those occasions when magic threads refuse to work. I like the type of needle sold for cross stitch embroidery, and I find that size 26 for finer threads (size 40 - 100) and size 24 for the heavier threads suits most occasions.

Finally some threads will be difficult to pass through the eye of a needle and for those occasions I keep a needle threader handy.

Keep your tatting kit together and organised, and you will be able to work on your favourite lace whenever you have a few spare minutes!