Patterns for snowmen are a bit of a challenge to find, but Sandy Scales and Barbara Foster have written a free one that can be found on the Handy Hands Tatting site here. It is cute and fairly straight-forward to carry out. Another such design is Wanda Salmans' "Button-centered Tatted Snowman" written in 2015. This one, too is simple but effective. Monica Hahn included 2 snowmen patterns in her Dover Needlework publication entitled "Christmas Angels and other Tatting Patterns" Debbie Arnold sells a pair of patterns in her Etsy Shop and a completed tatted snowman is available for purchase from Tatted Dreams by Jolene Etsy shop. That was for the most part the extent of what I found. If I missed anything, it's on me, but armed with these patterns I set to work.
It took several months to finish them, but to date, I have completed a total of 12 snowman bodies from 3 different patterns including ones with button centers and an older pattern that I have modified so that it went together more smoothly. If a hat was part of the pattern, such as in the Scales & Foster pattern, the over all appearance seemed rather stiff. Some of the patterns did not include hats at all. So off to the land of images went I looking for something I could use to add whimsy to the finished products. I found a few that I though might be suitable, printed them out, re-sized them as necessary and came up with 3 options that I thought might work. They looked like this:
Craft foam sheets are cost effective and easy to cut through. They are useful in many crafting applications and really fit the requirements in this case because they are light weight, solid construction and not translucent or transparent. I traced off the reapective outlines for each design and cut each out so that I had hats that looked something like this once a hat band was added:
The hats aren't very big some smaller ribbons were in order. Since I am confined to our camper until the house is finished, I have to rely on what craft supplies I can find in our storage lockers unless I want to purchase items I have no room for. Each hat that was worked up ranged in size between 1 inch and 2 1/2 inches wide and no more than an inch high. If the ribbons on hand were too wide, I cut them down to a suitable size before adding them to the craft foam "hats."
For the most part, the items were something I could use easily, but the ribbon with the red pom-poms was going to require greater modification, I cut off the red pom-poms for use as "buttons" reserving the white band for use on some hats themselves.
