Tatting with friends

There's a place in America that I would love to go to but never will, sadly. 

That's the Finger Lakes Tatting convention which you can find here. 

I 'nearly' got there one year but it wasn't when the group were meeting and I was in a plane flying from Toronto to Newark on my first leg home from another tatting convention!!! I was looking out of the window and saw the lakes but I didn't have a handy parachute so wasn't able to float down. 

All reports I've heard about Karey's group have been wonderful with great hospitality and super teachers. 

I have 'sort of' been involved this year as I have test tatted the snowflake that Martha is teaching. It's the Mrs. Mee Pearl Snowflake. This is SUCH a pretty tat and I love the picots and how they're formed. 

Martha is a challenge to test tat for as her work is always, but always perfect so trying to 'catch her out' makes me concentrate even more on each instruction. The picots worked so well following her text that I would love to incorporate them in future designs of my own. When/IF I ever get back to the shuttles!!!  

Thank you Martha for letting me play with this. Here's a picture. 

ANOTHER rainy day

I think it's rained nearly every day this year and it's doing it again today so it's a good excuse to stay home and add things to my web site!!! 

There's another new pattern from Tat Days 2024 now available on my free pattern site.  Look in the section 'odds and ends'!

This is one of the rare patterns that I'm really pleased with!!!  Takes a lot to please me, I'm afraid!

On a side note - I'm fed up with two of the Facebook tatting groups that I belong to.  One at least I'm going to leave purely because there's now more crochet being shown than tatting.  I've reported this to admins and then messaged them too but nothing changes.  I do love to crochet from time to time (and knit) but I don't like to see it in tatting groups.  As I only go to Facebook to see what's happening in Tat Land I can easily leave those groups and life will become simpler!!!

A new pattern

Now this is one of the patterns I offered to teach at Palmetto Tat Days in 2024 - but they chose others!!!  

Finally found my copy on the geriatric computer so have now added it to the pattern site under jewellery and earrings.

When it comes to designing earrings I find that it's hard to come up with ones which don't 'bend' after being worn a few times.  I tend to mainly use mercerised cotton for my work as I'm not very fond of the 'newfangled' polyester threads.  I've called this one the One, Two, Three earring.  Don't ask me why - it's just the way my addled old brain works!!!

Valentine's Day Is coming up!

Well I've never ever had a Valentine card or present from what I can remember.  I may have when I was a heck of a sight younger but I think I'd have remembered!!!

I was fiddling around a week or two back looking through my stash of doodads.  I felt an urge to make new earrings even though I’ve got quite a collection of them!!!  I found these little heart shaped doodads so decided to play around with them.  This is what ‘happened’.  

Constant wet weather has kept me in and walks would’ve become paddles if I’d tried to get out and about.  My umbrella is grumbling about doing ‘overtime without pay’!!!

Finally managed it!!!

What, you may well ask!!!  I’ve finally uploaded one of the patterns I taught at Tat Days (Palmetto’s wonderful event) back in 2024.  If you look under ‘Motifs’ it’s the This Way and That Way Motif.  You’ll see that I’ve split up the original page that had motifs, snowflakes and ‘something else’ into three separate pages.  I hope it’ll be easier to find things.

It must be about eighteen months since I last uploaded anything on the site and, to be totally honest, I’d almost forgotten how!!!

I pay for the site and I like to get my money’s worth out of it so I started a week or so ago trying to re-learn how to do it.  First of all I use SeaMonkey to make the html page for the index.  That’s the first page you come to.  That’s not easy at all when you’ve got a geriatric computer and a brain like a leaky bucket.  I’ve now decided CATEGORICALLY that I’m truly OLD.  People tell me I should slow down but nobody’s told me how to!!!

I’m still working on the site but hope to get it finished soon.  I’ve managed to lose the ‘search’ facility and I am struggling to work out how to put it back!!!  I’ll have to leave it until another day as I’m totally flummoxed!!!

For those who don’t know where to find the site - Here it is!!!

How to display your shuttles

When I moved into my new place I decided not to put my nice and important shuttles in to the printer’s tray I’d had for years.  Mainly because they kept falling out and I wasn’t prepared to stick them in place in case I damaged them.

I pondered for several months on what to do with them and in the end ‘scrounged’ a rod from my friend Tim and he helped me put it up.  I love the way I can see them all (well, I think I’ve got more but haven’t located them yet) and that I can easily rearrange them if I want to.  

From a student at my last Tat Days in 2024

For the life of me I have no idea whose work this is but I recognise the mouse as ‘one of mine’!!!  It’s my dear friend Ann who can be found here.  She was a participant at Tat Days too!!  I’ve no idea what the face is about but isn’t it fun?  I simply HAD to leave it there as it makes me smile.  Hopefully the ‘owner or owners’ of these two items will jump up and tell me!!

This is the last of the posts that have been sitting in my drafts for well over a year so now I’ll be updating you all on the other projects I’ve been working on during my absence!!

WATCH THIS SPACE!!!!

Katie’s snowflake thingy

I’m now exploring some draft posts that I’d done and not published back in 2024!!!  This is one of the patterns which I taught at Palmetto Tat Days back then.

I’ve a feeling this must be Katie Verna’s snowflake but I’m not sure.  It’s one of my designs but again I’ve ‘lost track’ of whether I’ve posted it on my site or not.  I’m sure somebody will let me know!!!  

You’re NEVER going to believe this but ….

I’m BACK.  

I’ve let my blogging slide over the past year or more due to ‘circumstances’ back in the old git’s life.  Several situations I found myself in caused me to be rather busy and blogging is one of the things that’s suffered.  I’m not going to tell you all about the circumstances as I’ll probably bore y’all to death but I’ll try and start from my return from Palmetto Tat Days last autumn.  No, sorry, the autumn before (2024).  That’s if my poor old BC3 can remember back that far!!!

Just to tease you I’ll add a picture that was part of the reason I’ve been so busy.  I’ll leave you to guess what I was ‘up to’.  

Oh, you can blame Diane (Lacelovin Librarian) for my return as she’s started blogging again!!  I may change the title of my blog to ‘Tatting and Crafting’ as knitting, sewing and crochet have also been part of my life.  I do have at least two new patterns to share soon, I hope.  

A bit of my history!

It was waaaayyyy back when I was raising kids and working full-time that this article was published in the local newspaper.  I hope you can read it!!!  

Well, that's if you want to, of course!!!!

Monday Moan - beads

No I'm not complaining about beads at all but I do have a gripe about how they're used by some people in their tatting designs.

I test tatted a design for a new designer a while back and was gobsmacked to find that she was telling people to sew beads onto the work.  WHAT?  I could scarcely believe it.  Why would you tell people to sew on beads unless you're a new designer who doesn't know the craft from the inside out.

As it turned out this particular lass really didn't know the craft of tatted lace at all.  She'd only been tatting a short while and had then decided she'd become a designer.  Great idea but ..........  

Back to beads.  I think (do tell me if I'm wrong) there is only one situation when a bead MAY need to be 'sewn on' after the piece is finished (I'm talking about the traditional way of tatting with a shuttle) and that's when it's a very large bead that is required to sit in a ring.  Sometimes called a focal bead.  Even THAT can be avoided in many cases by including it in the tatting like this or this.  You can also add the focal bead to the centre of a split ring too.  

For those who sell on Etsy with some of these wonderful tatted jewellery pieces I do hope you're including ALL beads in the actual work and not sewing on afterwards.  I'd hate to be a customer who's glorious piece of jewellery fell apart when the sewing came undone.

So my advice (whether asked for or not - and NONE of you did!!!!) is please, please, please don't sew beads onto tatting - include them safely while you're working.  

As you know I don't 'do' videos as I feel they're making people lazy about reading patterns but in this case (techniques) I think they're valuable.  I do have a bead technique section here on my pattern site.  Free patterns are available here too.

May I add that none of the beads (except when added to a picot) were added to the thread before starting the work - see the Fantasy Flower here.