This pattern looks more complicated than it is!

Once deconstructed, you’ll see it’s in fact rather easy. For ease of reference in the tutorial, I have used dishcloth cotton and a 2 mm tatting hook. For the black sample in the pictures, I used a no-name cotton thread that came on cones and which goes perfectly with my 1.5 mm hook.

You may need to adapt your hook to the thread by choosing a hook size smaller than what is called for by your thread.

Required knowledge:
cro-tatting basics: double stitch (DS)
closing a ring
making half-rings
making picots and joining picots

All of this can be learned and practised by following the first few lessons (up to and not including the multi-coloured cro-tatting) of Enfys’ lovely tutorial, which can be found here: http://www.enfys.me.uk/crotat-stitches-on-tutorial.htm

Oh, and:
If you don’t want to make the entire shebang, you can stop after one motif, join the picot of ring 6 to a finding and make yourself a pair of nifty earrings…

If you are following Enfys’ tutorial to learn this, please also consider joining us in her group:
http://www.ravelry.com/groups/crotat-workshop