Beadwork magazine has a new contest to enter!
About the competition: To celebrate our love affair with books and beads, Beadwork announces our sixth international juried competition and exhibition: The Beaded Book!
The Beaded Book is bound to bring out your creative genius. Alter a book, re-create a favorite character, bead a page of text, or make whatever your imagination can conjure up relating to beads and books. Show us your passion for books and beads in one creative effort. We can’t wait to see how you combine glitterati with literati! The winning entries will be published in a gallery in Beadwork magazine and the actual works will be exhibited at Bead Expo Santa Fe in March 2009 and Bead Fest Philadelphia in August 2009.

Preliminary guidelines:
The object must be no larger than 12” X 12”.
The object can be created with any bead technique.
The object should be comprised of at least 50% beads.
Your work should have been created within the past two years.
Preliminary entries (entry form and image only) are due December 18, 2008.

Cool challenge for you tatters who love to use beads!

Here is the original of the pattern I'm using to make a small mat. It's from the Fall/Winter 1950-51 issue of McCall's Needlework and Crafts. As you can see, they've placed dishwear in strategic places so I can't really see how the pattern flows.

The directions said to make the center and surround it with rows 1-3. Well, the center already had a "row 1". The Row 1 after that applied to several motifs together, not just one. I did get it figured out but not before I'd tatted halfway around and then I had to cut a piece out for a corner and retat. I got in such a hurry the next day that I forgot about Row 3 - there is supposed to be another round!

Here's the motif for next Saturday's Romanian Point Lace class. I chose the simplist motif and needleweaving I could find. Even so, I doubt very much if anyone will complete it in the amount of time we have.

I think I might use this to premier a blog for my lace group. I'm really tempted to make motifs and attach them together myself, but it will be a good group project too, so I think I won't do that for now.