First of all, I want to thank everyone for their kind words and well-wishes regarding my broken ankle. The last month has been difficult in many ways, the tree fall and the broken ankle the most traumatic but not the only bad luck I've had. I've decided that I'm just having it all at once and now, this last day of the month, I am done with it. The rest of the year is going to be absolutely AWESOME!!!

I wanted to show you the pansy I found in the tatting supplies I was gifted with in an earlier post.


I'm pretty sure this is the pattern of Pam DeVries. I see now that I laid it out wrong, but it's pretty no matter how you do it. This has been on my "to do" list for a long time. Since this is an online pattern, I'm guessing she might have been known online?

There were some simple white circle motifs that appeared to be part of something larger in mind but I'm not sure what. As I mentioned before, the tatting is perfect. I asked her daughter how long her mother had tatted since the supplies all look fairly new and she said that she never stopped, she thought she even tatted in her sleep. "She was into sewing most of her life and started with making a quilt, with her mother, at a very young age. Through the years she was always sewing something. She tatted, crosstitched, embroidery, quilting, knitting, crochet and whatever else there was, she did." Her name was Jane Smith and she was originally from Ft. Wayne, but worked for years in New Jersey.

Her daughter is from Pennsylvania so perhaps she lived her later years there, I'm not sure. I asked for a photo of her because I wanted to put a face with this wonderful woman and I got one but I haven't asked permission to show it so for now, it won't be posted. She reminded me very much of my own mother's photos though.


This flyer was also in the box. It looks like something from the 40's but it's probably the only thing really old in the container. Of course her daughter kept anything completed. There were 27 hankies in there and I asked if she liked tatting edgings on hankies and not suprisingly, the answer was yes. Most of the thread is size 70/80 so she worked quite a bit with the finer stuff. I mentioned that she must have been very organized because the shuttles with thread are marked with bits of tape as to what the thread size was. Also inside the larger threads, she had written the size. You know how when you use enough of the ball that the label falls away and sometimes you can't tell the difference between size 20 and size 30, especially in white or ecru? I think all the shuttles are Boye plastic ones except for one white one that I'm not sure about. It's very similar though. I didn't ask, but I wondered if she tatted with beads at all.

It's a bright sunshiny day and I noticed the temperature is now 33º, just above freezing - a nice change from 5º that it was last night!

One of my comments from the last post was from a man in India who writes, paints and does literary criticisms. I didn't publish it since my feeling was that it was basically a link back to his own work (which was nice) and a way to drum up business, since it was only about writing and painting. Especially after I read the comments on his site, it appeared that he went to several blogs and made complimentary comments. It just didn't seem to have anything to do with tatting. In other words, I felt it was a marketing ploy. Neither my writing or art is distinguishing at this point in time. Fun, but not something I would consider outstanding and I have more local and dependable resources for criticism and input if I were to choose that route. If anyone IS interested, I can give you the link. Email me privately. There is an email link up by my photo.

In my next post, I'll show you some beads and glass buttons and charms I got from a very dear lady...and hopefully some tatting but at the moment, my fingers are all taped up to heal the cracks. I boiled several pans of water today and never did see any steam on the kitchen window so you know it is dry as a bone here!