Another Sneak Peak

Here's another of the toys in my upcoming book.  I remember playing with these, do you?

I've been busy....

You may have noticed that I haven't been blogging much lately.  (Yeah, right, what else is new?)

I've been busy.  Busy trying to get a new pattern book finished in time for Palmetto TatDays, and right now things are looking good.  

My team of test tatters is hard at work.

Do you remember this unicorn?  I had it at Palmetto a couple of years ago and won an Honorable Mention at the state fair with it.  It's going in the book!

I turned it into a pegasus too, what fun.

The book?  It's all about tatted toys.

Spring at Last

While the rest of Tattingland is hard at work on the 2016 Renulek doily, here I am just finishing the one from 2015.  I had planned to finish it in time for the fair, but I decided rushing was not doing the quality of my tatting any good.  I finished the tatting a while back, but there were ends to sew in. Lots and lots of ends...

Gardening

I've been tatting a little and spinning a little, but nothing worth showing yet, in part because I've also been spending a lot of time out doors instead.  Here is my personal plot in the neighborhood garden.  It's looking a bit over grown here since I had not picked the lettuce and spinach for some days when it was too rainy.  So far, so good, with the plastic fencing to keep out the deer.

I wish I were as good with growing flowers.  When I plant flower seeds, I never know if I am planting them, or simply burying them, RIP.

Palmetto Preview

Palmetto Tat Days is the event I most look forward to every year.  In the spring, the suspense grows, waiting first for the teacher list, and then to see the class projects.  

The pages are still under construction, but you can see the class projects HERE and the schedule HERE.  There are some amazing projects here.  Now the suspense waiting for registration to open.  As a teacher, I'm busy most of the time, but I can pick a class for my free time. What will I choose?

Above is the logo designed by Erin.  Isn't it clever?

See you there!

A Bargain

Sometimes, when I should be doing something more productive or going to bed, I do a little online window shopping instead.  Look at this bargain I found HERE on Amazon Canada. 

A fifteen page booklet for $1717.16 Canadian, or approximately $1373.46 US.  Less than a thousand hundred US dollars per page!  I boggle at the notion of 15 pages.  How can one of the pages have only one side?  Is this bending the dimensions of the space time continuum?  Maybe that miracle is the reason for the price.  Don't you dare say it's just that the front cover isn't numbered. What fun is that.

And only a little over 6 dollars more to mail it to me.  I'll have to start saving my pennies.

OK, going to bed now.

Rapid Retro-tatting

"Retro-tatting" is the humorous term for picking out stitches or untatting.  When we find a mistake a ways back, there is the hard decision whether to pick out stiches all the way back, or just cut off the work.  I am surprised I never hear anyone talk about the rapid method for retro-tatting. 

What you have to do is unwind the thread off the shuttle and pull the core thread out through the stitches.  On a chain, you can get a grip on the core thread at the base of a ring, or under a picot.  To pull out a ring, start out sort of how you open a closed ring.  Put a crochet hook in a picot and pull on the core thread until there is enough you can pull on.  While pulling the core thread though the stitches, the thread end will twist and flail about, so be careful that it doesn't get knotted.

 

OK, it's a bit tedious, and not real fast, but we're tatters, and slow and tedious is what we do.  Sometimes it beats picking out stitches.