I can't believe it's so late already! hmmm...I was up around 5:00 a.m. and then went back to bed about 6:30 and slept til 10:00 a.m. The only bad thing about having several days off in a row is that I naturally revert to my normal body rhythm. I'm a nightowl. I'd be up until 2 or 3:00 a.m. every night if I didn't have to get up for my day job. LOL! That's also when I do my most creative work. Ah, well...today I did tat but I think that piece is going to Trina so I can't show it yet. I also finished up the 2nd filet crochet piece for the bag. This is going to be an example for the crochet lace class next spring and it will also probably be involved in our Lace Day. (March 28th!) This pattern is for a glasses case but I used a bigger thread, size 10, so that the stitches can be seen more easily so it's really too big for glasses unless you happen to have big oversized movie-star specs. I'm going to alter the way it's put together a little bit. I'll crochet a shell edging around all three sides, crocheting the two pieces together at the same time and continuing around the top. The pieces are supposed to be sewn together and then a fabric lining made and the uppermost row of crochet turned in and stitched to the fabric. I'll make a fabric lining but it will be removable. It will be a good exercise in following a graph.


I mentioned recently that I'd been going through my old Anna magazines. The one thing that struck me as I checked out all the tatting projects is how they use tatting with linens. We do a lot of motifs and use a hellatious number of techniques in the process but I don't think we (meaning Americans) work with tatting design and fabric very much. It's a shame really. The photo above is one from a scan someone sent me several years ago. It and the one below were in one of those "compressed" files that I have trouble opening but today as I was looking for something else, I found a couple of those files, opened them and saved them in a different format. I believe these are both from older Anna magazines from overseas. The language was not English but didn't appear to be German either.

It's hard to see the tatting clearly in this table cover but you can see there are four square pieces - think of a 12"-14" square doily - which is alternated with fabric (probably linen) squares and the blocks are joined by strips of tatting. You can see the tatting is an open and simple design for both the blocks and the strips. I can't tell if the linen has a simple tatted insertion or if that is drawn thread work. I suspect it is drawn thread work.

I think of all the people who are in the process of making a tablecloth or even a runner made up of only tatted motifs. No wonder they get discouraged and put off finishing it!

I'm thinking it would be reasonable to assume you could tat a square doily in a month's time. The four squares could be done easily within a year. The more time consuming (and tedious) part would probably be the connecting strips. Wouldn't that be an elegant table cover though????


I was equally entranced by this pillow. It looks like 3 large motifs and half a dozen medium motifs. I think the smaller segments with the holes are embroidered, not tatted. I also can't tell if the tree itself is embroidered or padded, as in trupunto.

Why aren't we decorating more of our linens and clothing with tatting? I was telling someone recently that I need to make a curtain for my kitchen window and I wanted to make white panels with tatted inserts and an edging. And then I laughed. Such grand dreams, it seems sometimes....and yet....how hard would that be?

I'll let you know.