When Toddlers Attack......!

You'd think I'd know better.......

She was sitting in my rocking chair in Tatting corner with her back to me, and I thought nothing of it. Ten minutes later I walk by to find a half unwound spool of my precious Zwicky silk strung all over the chair. Gasp batman, the little joker struck again! Some of it made it back on the spool, but here lies the knotted mess that had to be cut off and tossed. Silly girl is very interested in my "dadding" as she calls it.....she will stand in front of me sometimes while I tat, and pick up a stray piece of string and start making her own little tatting motions. She expecially likes the pink clover "shuddowes".

Whoopsie!

Mary Konior, Lacelovinlibrarian, and Steph would all understand my pain.

Sigh. It was supposed to be another spinning wheel. In size 80. Ten points if you spot the reason I had to cut this piece off and start again. Steph, the queen of skinny threads, do you ever bother to unpick at that size? Ugh.

Amused

It's Tuesday everyone! And I've been tatting! However un-amused I am that this "Amusement" doily took me two weeks to finish..... It's done. That darn Lizbeth "desert bloom" is hard to find patterns that work well with the colorway. But, in the end I like this. Suzanne, the ring closing thing finally clicked and I understand what you were saying. I'm only successful at keeping that last stich in place about half the time, but I'm definitely aware of it now! I can now say that I confidently drop the shuttle through before closing the ring. except when covering a cabone ring. Then it doesn't work.

Anyway my friends, I am more amused with life today. We got some news that our deal with buying the house has found it's way out of a pile on someone's desk and is actually moving forward. No approval quite yet. But hey, I've only been doing this since JUNE, what's a few more weeks lol?!?! And I've lost a few pounds, that always makes a girl feel good.

Edited to ad-The pattern for the amusement doily is out there somewhere, the link wasn't working yesterday, but just in case it comes back, try HERE

Nooooo!

AWw, somehow I managed to delete all the encouraging comments you all had left me! My Flustrimication must be trying to rear it's ugly head again lol! I'm feeling more chipper this morning for sure. The littlest one is a morning person lol....

Flustrimacated.

I've invented a new word.

Flustrimacated.

It's the only term I can find to describe my mood today. I have no reason to be feeling wonky, really. There are dishes in the sink and there are piles of laundry to be folded, but that's not news. I did start the Pill a week ago or so, can I blame it on that lol? :-p Sigh. I've just been annoying myself lately. My attitude about the monotonous housework has been less than joyful, and my own whining is making me batty.

Note: One should not tat while suffering symptoms of Flustrimication. It will result in more time spent in dissatisfaction with the current selection of tatting patterns, than time spent actually tatting. And any resulting tatted work will probably be unsatisfactory to the flustrimacatee. And trust me, I'd dose heavily with chocolate if I had not decided to plunk down the dinero to go back to Weight Watchers last week! Phhht.

I'm shameless. Yes it's true.

Here it is, another plug for LadyShuttlemaker's weekly giveaway! Click on the above picture to find her blog and enter if you like, but really you don't have to --because if you do my chances of winning go down. So don't enter lol!!!! My shamelessness comes in my reason for posting this- I get a second entry for doing so. :-)

No, really....I do actually Tat...

I was looking through my recent posts and discovered that I haven't posted anything that I myself have tatted in just about a month. Hmmm. Well truth be told I get to sit down and tat on or two nights a week. Maybe. If I'm lucky and nobody is having difficulty with their bedtime. So I thought I would prove once again (to myself mostly) that yes, I do tat. After all, HandyHands is getting new colors of Lizbeth soon and I need to be able to say that I am using the thread that I have, so I can justify my need for more.

So here is my proof. It's a Birgit Phelps pattern, called Peacock heart, I just added the tail to call it a bookmark. It's made of the Zwicky silk floss that I received, and will be in the mail to someone this week, I won't mention who though, in case she reads this. The tail isn't perfect, I've never done a josephine chain that long on shuttles before, and I haven't quite got the knack of how to let the chain twist properly so it stays even. But that's what practice is for, right?

Hello friends.

Hi everyone. No great feats of tatting to post unfortuanately. I haven't really felt like I've had time to tat lately, and I feel my lack of participation in the blog community, so I thought I'd pop in to say hello at least.

We are just busy right now. We have another house deal in the works, it's another one of those poorly named "short sale" situations. Nothing about a short sale is short. So we wait indefinitely on the bank...... Not sure if we are moving or not. So I don't know if I should pack or sort or what. I've been way stressed out, more than usual for me, and I can't keep my mind on things lately so tatting has been an effort in vain--- I'm making knots and I don't mean in a good way lol! So hopefully soon things will settle down, or maybe I'll settle down. I definitely need to seek my peace from above and not from the thread basket though lol!

Anyway, church in the early morning, so I'm off to bed like a good girl.


-Krystle

Ooooohhh goodies!

What is this box of loveliness you might ask?

SILK! LOTS OF SILK!

This week when Gram came, she had brought her friend Vivian for company on the drive. Well, I guess after showing her some of my jewelry and other tatting, she was "quite taken" as Gram put it lol. So soon after they returned home, she came back down the driveway and delivered this batch of threads to be sent my way. I believe Viv does some sort of weaving herself, so this must be from her stash.

I'm hoping for some assistance from the blogging community at large, maybe you can help me decipher the sizing system on these spools.

On each there is a set of number that look like this. Some say 70/3, some say 30/3 or 60/3 like the pink one above. The larger numbers seem to indicate smaller threads just like tatting thread is sized.....and I am thinking that the /3 might mean 3 ply? All are follwed by a number indicating the length of thread on the spool, and are of the brand "Zwicky". I looked around online a bit, and didn't find much information on this thread, its' possible that it is no longer made.

Anywho, this was my big happy surprise today. Not that I'll have time to play with it of course! I just put one darling down for a nap, and of course now the other is beckoning from the bassinet. Such is life!

A little lace of old.

Had a lovely afternoon with Gram today. She came all the way down to visit us girls and talk tatting! We had lunch at Applebees, thankfully both little ones were on their best behaviour. (that of course came to a screeching halt upon arriving home lol) While Gram was here I pulled out these doilies to illustrate the necessary skill of hiding ends. We are not 100% sure of the origin of these doilies, they are most likely from Checkoslovakia back in the 1940's. My Great grandfather was sent over there during WWII, and some of the people there sent gifts back after he came home, for a number of years as I understand it. Well, I spotted these in Gram's china cabinet and petitioned her for posession of them. She of course obliged, on condition of receiving a pair of tatted earrings. (speaking of which, I shall have to mail them now Gram, I forgot to pack them with you before we left for lunch! Serves you right for not coming back to the house to stay longer. :-) Anyway, the doilies are intriguing. Both are heavily starched, done in what seems to be a crochet cotton, maybe size 30 The larger of the two very well demonstrates the traditional method of tatting a motif, in which the ends are simply tied and cut and left to dangle. No wonder vintage patterns have so many rounds..... they didn't bother with the painstaking process of end-wrangling that the newer techniques provide. I count at least seven rounds for the smaller doily. I can't ever imagine voluntarily tatting a pattern without climbing out of at least a few of the rounds. Most of us nowadays with more evolved tatting sensibilities would either choose a different pattern or heavily modify it to minimize the

number of ends that require assistance. In the larger piece, each of the outer motifs is tatted in two rounds and then attached separately. Can you imagine? :-)

To finish off my day today, I received some goodies in the mail. First, a flat screen monitor for my computer that I scored for $48 at auction, and another mystery box from Grandpa in NY- more books for Ivi and ANOTHER 40 copies of Workbasket! I think they have a large collection that is working its way to me a little at a time. I'm fine with that :-0