Tatting Tea Tuesday 12/29/09

Love and scandals are the best sweeteners of tea. ~ Henry Fielding


I almost forgot that today was Tatting Tea Tuesday and then I read Heather's blog post about it being the last one of 2009. Can't close the year without a tea post!

Today I've been alternating between water and iced tea, the iced tea flavored with vanilla chai tea. I added less sweetner than usual because my tea had been tasting too sweet and yet, this still tastes a little too sweet for me.

Someone asked me what I was going to do with the matching edging and needlelace center so I contemplated making a small tea cozy today and embellishing it with the edging and motif, but I had company and I've been tatting for a friend so I didn't get to it.


Here's the pair of earrings I've made for her. The brown and turquoise pair are for her granddaughter. I made a black and gold pair before but I used Altin Basak gold thread. This gold is the same Sparklers thread I used for the all-gold pair. She helps manage a spa for her son and the color theme is gold and black there so she wears/embellishes accordingly. (in Vegas Baby!)

In return, she made me some scented bath salts which arrived today! She took the scents I told her I really liked and came up with an essential oil mixture that is perfect for me. The bag on the left is Ginger-Lemon and the one on the right is Lavendar-Sandalwood. SOOOOO...I not only get to loll around drinking tea and tatting today, I get to take a wonderful scented bath! Except my drain stopper is broke and I have to use something else to plug up the water and I'm not sure the current plug works so I will test its ability to hold water before I dump precious bath salts in.

In the meantime, I'm luvin' this time off!

There's not a lot of demand for striping in tatting but for those who knit or crochet or sew items with stripes, and who design, visualizing the outcome can be tricky. While browsing CraftStylish this morning, I found a link to a stripe generator at Biscuits and Jam. You select the colors you want to work with and the number of rows for each color. It's limited to the same number of rows for each color, in other words, you can't mix it up with wide and narrow stripes. Then you click on the generator and it shows you a visual of the colors. If you don't like the order of the colors, refresh the page and it will generate a new one. It also lists the color sequence and number of rows for the pattern.

6 of burlywood O O O O O O
6 of lightsalmon O O O O O O
6 of indianred O O O O O O
6 of lightsalmon O O O O O O
6 of burlywood O O O O O O
6 of indianred O O O O O O
6 of lightsalmon O O O O O O
6 of indianred O O O O O O
6 of burlywood O O O O O O

I tried to save the picture but I would have to save the whole html and decided that would be too cumbersome for this and I couldn't copy the actual rectangle of stripes either. You get the idea. Those big "o"s at the end of each line actually show the color of the stripe too. There are instructions on how to save the color scheme. They just won't work for here without ...mmm...more knowledge than I have. LOL!

Ah...Erin finally opened her SS package from me! Here's the second bell I tatted from Wanda's Bell Pattern. Darn...I can't remember the details now! I think I added a gold thread with the tatting thread and it turned out larger than the other one. It still fit on the glass bell but it just didn't look right. I added the topaz bead and a ribbon so that it can be hung whereever Erin likes.

Anyone who knows Erin knows she is addicted to PINK. Many have tried to wean her away from PINK and to some extent they have been successful. Even so, I simply could not resist the urge to tat these Christmas tree earrings in pink. These are a bolder brighter pink than the test sample I did earlier. I wondered if she would guess it had something to do with her when it was in pink on the blog. I had been to an open house downtown where different designers had decorated each room of an historic building in their own style for a "contest". One of the rooms was largely pink including a huge PINK tree. I wanted to take a photo with my cell phone but the darned thing kept telling me it was full and wouldn't snap a photo. I was going to use that photo so explain my sample pink tree and my plans were foiled! Anyway, once I made the first part, I decided that pink was too pale and went for a bolder look.

As noted in my last post, our family Christmas was Friday. It was incredibly foggy when I got there but cleared up and warmed up to 60º by the time I left. A sense of humor prevails in our family...these sock monkey slippers



were given to me




by my sister, Linda. Coincidently, I had just sent her a link to someone else's blog who was wearing the very same slippers! She already had them for me...which explains why she didn't reply to that email. LOL!


And the youngest member of the party yesterday, my great-grandson Cameron, who thought everyone's gifts were also his.