The sun is shining after several days of rain! It's still sweltering hot, but it's bright and sunny outside.



I got the pig done the other day! I gave up on the onion rings. They went well until the 4th round so I thought I'd do chains instead but I think the onion rings look better. I used pink wings instead of white because all the flying pigs I've seen had pink wings. I suppose if they were meant to be angels, then they should be white.






Then I tried emptying some shuttles and testing some motifs at the same time. The big flower is just using a pencil as a picot gauge. The diamond motif is from Patti Duff's book, Mini-Tats. The other thing is from Tatted Samplers - the beginning of the ribbon sampler. I just wanted to see how well the instructions worked out. They are very precise but one sentence is after the other, making it hard to follow even with a post-it, so I'm going to type them out, line by line.





Sometimes it's dangerous to let me out shopping. LOL! I met my two youngest sons downtown to for dinner to celebrate my middle son's birthday. I was about a half hour early so I walked up to the next block to see what was there because I very seldom shop downtown. I walked into an antique store....found these McCall's Needlecraft magazines. I have several, but these are from some early years that I don't have very many of so I looked through the stack and picked five. Only $2.50 each which is cheaper than what I've found on Ebay.







On top of that, 4 of the 5 had tatting in them, something unheard of in their later issues. This luncheon set is probably very similar to what was in most pattern books at the time. I think this issue is 1950-51.










I had to giggle over this bra ad. See the pointy cups? Now you know why my generation burned bras when we came of age. I refrained from scanning the girdle ads.













These edgings seem to be different from the norm. This issue was 1960. I was 11 years old.









From 1953....when you click on the image and read the enlarged text, you will find they have been trying to make crochet look like tatting for over a half-century now. This piece is very nice.














I'm tempted to try the booties some time. I'm partial to Lenore English's bootie pattern, but I should enlarge my pattern base too.