This adorable doggie sweater is featured as a free pattern at Lionbrand.com. Like many businesses, they offer the free pattern in hopes that you will purchase supplies from them. I do like Lion Brand but I cringed at the material list they show with the pattern - when you add it all up, it comes out to the neighborhood of $60.00. Yarn and knitting supplies has become big business. Frankly, I'd probably knit a whole lot more if it wasn't so expensive but to get a good quality yarn, you have to shell out a few bucks more. Guess that's why I stick to tatting. A $5 or $6 ball of thread will tat up tons and tons of lace while an $8 or $9 ball of yarn will only get a tiny portion of a sweater.

You might have noticed Tatting Goddess has a slightly new look. I finally switched to the newer templates blogger has. I've been holding out because it takes so long to get everything in place. I got all the links I already had transferred, but there are more I wanted to add that weren't on the original. I took off the search engine because blogger now has one listed at the top that will search the blog itself if you are looking for something specific. I've had this blog for 4 years now....I really need to find a way to save the archives. Unfortunately, it's not something blogger offers. I have the posts saved up to a certain point, probably about 6 months ago. Must be time to save them again. It's a long process - you have to save them individually. I suppose I should have started saving each post in the beginning but I had no idea if I would continue or not.

Currently I'm still preparing for our Lace Day on April 14. Last night I worked a little more needlelace on the Romanian Point Lace mask. I'm using the neon colored rayon sewing thread for the filling stitches, doubled since it is so fine. I'm not terribly experienced with this so it's an experiment as I go along. The cord is rather thick for the filling thread I'm using but the space between isn't that big either so a thicker thread might look too coarse. I'll work on it more this weekend.

I have almost all of the shuttles in my carry-around bag emptied. I have 4 shuttles going with a round celtic motif from Judith Connors. I've made it before and it seemed like a good candidate for the 2 threads I needed to empty out of shuttles...of course, now, I need to add more thread to finish the motif......

I'm also working on another antique insertion. The rings are easy enough but I'm not clear on the edges. I have not completed the new version on the clover doily either. I got to the last round and it started to cup again so I need to cut all that out and figure out how to make the last round motifs wider. I could add more rings to the flower circle and I could make the clovers wider but if I do that, I'm taking out all those picots. That's a real pain to tat! Essentially what I'm doing is redesigning it.

Speaking of emptying shuttles, I keep finding shuttles attached to projects all over the house. I think it's time to complete a few things. AND get back to TAT, phase 2!