Archived books online & Tat Days

There is an online resource besides the Antique Pattern Library that offers several vintage books about Lacemaking. It's at The Internet Archive and is also where you can find "the Wayback Machine" to find websites and pages that no longer exist. There are other books and videos too,that are about other subjects entirely. I did find a few publications that I'd not seen in the Antique Pattern Library, so far anyway.

This link is all tatting and it uses lots of the decorative braid from the era.

This one is more crochet than tatting but still a nice assembly.

I was browsing the Interweave Magazine site when I found that corrections to Piecework Magazine projects can be found at this link!

There's been lots of talk lately about lace days, such as I.O.L.I. (International Old Lacers, Inc.) who held their annual convention in Portland last week. There are two more specifically tatting-related events coming up too! Both have "Fall Into Tatting" as their theme though I think the Fringe Element Group always uses that logo. The Palmetto Tat Days are being held in Toccoa, GA on August 27-28th this year.

For our tatting friends in the northern part of the hemisphere (a good location for those in the east too) there is a Tat Day in Cambridge, Ontario on September 24-25th hosted by the Fringe Element Tatters! Actually, I think it's really nice of them to space them out like that. Go to both!

hmmmm...did you know that if you hit "enter" when you are in the "title" box that it publishes your post????

And now for the tatting.

What do you mean this isn't tatting?

Oh, oh...this is crocheted? Irish crochet? Well, what do you know? LOL! Well, we've all had our share of explaining which lace is which, but what I'm really trying to do here is inspire you. Can you see this piece tatted? It's one side of a hexagon bag in a Leisure Arts publication. I was a bit bamboozled about which color to use for the outside, considering ecru, white or a solid to match one of the colors in the flower. Why oh why did I not think of black???? I will do the second half with black and then, of course, I will need to crochet yet another one. I suspect I will like the black better. The nice thing is I can simply pull a thread and all the ecru will unravel, ready for use again.

Oh...you want to know what I meant by "inspire you"? Okay, just think of how easy this would be to convert to tatting. The center rosette is already available in many different patterns. I'm thinking of #3 in Lene Bjorn's snowflake book. Now for the outside, it might take a bit of trial and error to get the stitch count right but it's practically all chains and picots. You can change the crocheted clusters to clunies or even rings if you prefer.

This is crocheted in Lizbeth size 20 in jellybean and ecru.