. . . . For this, my first, real, finished piece of tatted lace. When I was a little girl first testing the waters of the world of fiber work, I had a copy of Coats n Clark's 'How To' book---which encompassed knitting, crocheting, embroidery, tatting and amazingly enough, tunisian crocheting, which they called the afgan stitch. I was so intrigued by all of it so much that I wanted to do it all
. Now, I knit fairly well, crochet fairly well, embroider mostly when I have to. But the two arts out of that book that were, to me and any one I asked, the most obscure of the lot was tunisian crocheting and tatting--neither of which I really got the hang of at that time (I was about 11 at the time, I think); but all this time, they were both hanging in the back of my mind as something that someday I would learn to do, and to do as well as I could. Earlier this year, the tunisian crocheting forced it's way to the front of my subconscious and demanded to be learned, and learned well. I searched for and found the bible of tunisian crocheting, an amazing body of work called The Encyclopedia of Tunisian Crocheting, which I can't highly recommend to anyone gung-ho to learn---and I will post about my experiences learning tunisian crocheting another time. Over 500 stitches are found in it's pages, and I believe there is a part two in the works.
For the past two weeks, which should have been mostly devoted to holiday gift making and such, lo and behold, my muse has decided that I need to finally come to grips with tatting. I have searched for tutorials, perused web sites--some so old they didn't exist except as entries on a keyword search, some that hadn't been updated since mostly forever. Nevertheless, I have found that the tatting community does still exist and is still going quite strong--women and men still producing beautiful lace, writing patterns and teaching. I have spent quite alot of time working at it lately, my head buzzing late at night with how-to's on one-shuttle tatting, two shuttle tatting, one shuttle and one ball of thread tatting, the continuous threaded method, picots long and short, chaining, half rings, whole rings, split rings done with two shuttles and the awesome trick of split rings with only one shuttle, split chains, mock picots and the shoelace trick....I've waded through shuttle collections of others, went and bought five of my own-- two Clover, two Susan Bates of plastic with hard to remove bobbins but with lovely long and skinny hooks, one Susan Bates of aluminum with a not so great hook, but with a bobbin that moves like silk (which looks amazingly like the Coats n Clarks one I had years ago as an 11 year old).....I feel like I've squashed all the things I might have spent several years learning into less than two weeks! And I love it....
First photo is of a bookmark I made after the technique of working with two shuttles and split rings made sense, but before I really understood neither written patterns or charts, so I guess I designed it myself. It's actually a wonderful pink color, made of six strand embroidery floss. The next is a close-up 
This is the start of a snowflake, using two shuttles, but unfortunately before I grasped the continuous threading method. Still, I'm rather excited by how it's turning out. I have other little practise pieces, and two motifs I've tried my hand at, neither of which I can show because they are going to end up in some cards I'm giving to people that read this blog and I don't want to spoil the surprize....soon, I will also add a section to this blog listing all the sites I found to be the most helpful.
So do I like tatting? Ohhh, I love it. I told my husband I was adding another art/hobby to my arsenal, he threw me a long, suffering look and asked "Can it be contained in a box about this big, please????" marking out in the air an area of an imaginary box with about a one foot dimension. Oh, yes indeed.....it's even an inexpensive one.....but then, I didn't tell him about the handcrafted shuttles that cost around $22 to $50 a pop I've been checking out.......a fiber artist's life is nice.....
~Blessings always
