Whoo-Hoo! LOOK who's signed up for Palmettos already.....77 so far!

And look at the stuff to do! That is so kind of them to list all these activities and how far away they are. Cool!

Okay, maybe I'll enter a competition........but only if I'm not running myself ragged to do it. I have one week to prepare.



Ummmmmmm....yeah, I said I was too busy to try anything new...........but, I found this book on my bookshelf while looking for something else last night and remembered I hadn't tried anything from it yet. I'm at a point on my other project where I have to sew before I can add the tatting so I needed a project to take to work with me because I wasn't planning on going anywhere at lunch. I grabbed a ball or two of Altin Basik size 50 variegated and the book, Tatting Over a Cabone Ring by Sadie Allison, as well as a package of plastic cabone rings - we call them curtain rings, and stuffed them in my tatting bag.

After eating my McDonald's California Cobb salad and a brief meditation, I pulled out the book and got started. I picked a single shuttle pattern, which is a group A pattern, but group B patterns use 2 shuttles and Group C patterns use 4 shuttles.....clearly a challenge! If you know split chains, getting the thread on the ring is easy and if you don't, as the book says, it's excellent practice to learn the method of how the stitches are wrapped. I do know split chains so that part was easy and the rest was too......just rings with picots! The long picot becomes a double picot so you have 2 techniques to play with in this pattern. I made the 1st long picot 1/2" as it said, but it wasn't long enough to loop nicely so I made the rest more like 3/4" long. I'll use the too short one as the place to put a hanger.

It occurred to me while finishing this up tonight that these would be the perfect size for tatted ornaments for the Christmas tree our lace group will decorate and donate as a fundraiser for some group at Christmas. The rings included in the book are 3/4" but I had purchased a package of 5/8" rings and they were a bit skinnier too.

These would make charming fan pulls too. I'm getting all kinds of ideas for using them! There are 40 designs in the book so it will take awhile to try them out. I'm thinking metallic thread now too.....or glow in the dark????

Additionally........Charlotte in my lace group gave me a little bag that has a metal ring over it to hold it closed......you could do the same thing with the plastic ring, using a big one, with the tatting on it.....would be appropriate for a tatting bag too. The one Charlotte gave me has tatting on the trim. Guess I could show it here, huh?



Oh wow, I'm getting sleepy........all that heat and humidity we've been having is doing a number on me.