I can't believe it

2 hours of writing gone.....I lost it....sigh...

ONE NAP LATER

Oh that was a treasurepiece of writing lost....LOL! Nah....maybe it was a hint that I can do better. Anyway, it's not that I haven't had anything to write lately, but rather I've been too busy to stop and stick it in here!

This morning I demonstrated how to use a few different cluny looms at Tatting Guild in Greenfield. That meant I had to come up with some samples and test my looms out because I'm not an expert at it by any means. It just seemed a good opportunity to pursue it further and share what I was learning with others. Besides, the brunt of sharing has been with Kaye and it's been suggested more than once that maybe someone else could help out. So, I've been busy tatting clunies that week!



The patterns for these are available online, from left to right and top to bottom:
Cluny motif by Mimi Dillman
Diamond Rio bookmark by Bina ( I added picots on this )
Cluny motif by Steph Peters
Cluny Easter Eggs by Mimi Dillman (added picots on this too)

I found I preferred the foot or toe type of loom and those in the class seemed to agree. The smooth surface allows me to slide the shuttle through sideways without getting the shuttle point stuck in the holes of the plastic canvas looms. And they liked the way it was so easy to know which threads to pull. Like anything, practice makes perfect, or at least faster. I whipped out 12 of those babies on the bookmark last night within an hour!

Thanks to my granddaughter Katie, my niece Melissa, and my daughter Laurie for cutting out the looms for me Thursday night when we gathered for scrapbooking. Maybe next week I'll actually bring pictures to work with!

When I got home today, I had a picture from Sue Hanson showing her picot gauges, a subject we were talking about on the tatting list. Sue has a nice little collection here:


I mentioned links in the blog that showed some of my picot gauges but now I can't get the search engine to find the same links! One was in July, 2003 and the other in February, 2004. You can check the archives if you really want to see.

Oh boy....what else did I talk about?

I won some metal knitting needles along with a variety of crochet hooks and yarn bits on ebay last week. The needles were a bit rusty and corroded so I asked how to clean them and keep them clean. Mark "Tatman" suggested burnishing them with aluminum foil after cleaning. I don't have any regular steel wool at the moment, but I decided to go ahead and give the aluminum foil a try. Works pretty good! I have some 0000 knitting needles somewhere and these look a bit bigger, probably closer to 0 or 00. There are 8 of them so once I get them cleaned, I might try my hand at lace knitting.

And speaking of knitting...I have a nice little reference book around here somewhere ....and I can't find it! I know how to knit, but I wanted to try some alternative ways of casting on for the headband I'm going to knit. Isn't that the way it goes?



TA-DA! Got my T.A.T. packet back this week, along with a certificate, pin, and application for the next phase. Scores and comments from the 3 evaluators were included. All noted a weakness with tension and joining picots. My dimpled ring project, the one I meant to do over before sending and then decided to go ahead and send, consistently received the lowest score by all of them. Shoulda done it over! LOL! Tension issues were most prevalent on projects that I put down and then picked up weeks later. This has always been a problem for me. My tension can vary even during the day. The only comment that puzzled me suggested I tat over my beginning ends and then use a needle to hide the end tails. I do tat over my beginning threads so I'm not sure where that came from. I use a crochet hook to weave my ending ends through the ds waistbands. The best hiding of ends I've ever done were when I used the hook to pull the ends through the legs of the ds instead of the waistband, but it's hard to do with tiny thread or tight tatting. I'll have to work on that in the next phase.

I ended my lost entry mentioning that I was strongly considering going to Hector, NY for Tat Day after getting an offer for a ride from friends. I printed the application as I was waiting for my blog entry to publish, and then went out to get the mail, where I found I'd received Karey Solomon's newsletter, Tatting Times, and her latest publication, "Tatting Turns Over a New Leaf".

When I came back, I found my entry had somehow escaped into cyberspace, never to be seen again. Soooooooooo....we'll try it again!