What a week! My kitchen drain was clogged for 4 days and then my furnace started acting weird, but all is well now. The week or two before than inlcuded car trouble, a blizzard, no hot water, and other drains clogging. Time for a complete turn-around!

I finally got some tatting done for one of my masks. Another maple leaf and this strand of pearl (or purl) tatting with beads from Mary Konior's Tatting With Lace. It's on page 60 and called "Nightshade". Both the leaves and the edging are tatted with 2 strands of Sulky 30 wt rayon thread. I have more tatting to do for the mask but if this is all I get done, it will be enough. I have 2 others that I want to get done too!




This is Kaye Judt's bear that we tatted in the Greenfield Tatting Guild last Saturday. She used this in some of her early classes....quite a cutie to slip in a card or a scrapbook.








This is a practice piece for split rings and split chains that you can find on Sharon Briggs' website. The split chain in this piece goes all the way across instead of splitting in the middle so it's confusing at first as you look for where it's supposed to "bridge". My students actually used a different pattern for the first one but this is a good practice pattern to do the technique repeatedly.



This is the center of the motif I had my students use the split chain on to climb out into the next round. I was emptying a shuttle and that's as far as I got on this one so it does not have a split chain.





This is a ceramic shuttle handmade by Sherry Pence. I haven't had time to use it much. I wound some thread on it and made a ring but that's as far as I got. It's very lightweight considering it is ceramic and the post is tall ehough that a lot of thread will fit on there. I'm still attached to my clovers for utility, but Sherry's shuttles are lovely additions for the collector.

That's it for now...it's late and my eyes are burning. I'll work on the masks tomorrow!