Tatting Tea Tuesday at home again

We are back home again after a wonderful vacation. I wouldn’t have minded if it had lasted a little longer! We had a great time with our family and look forward to doing something like this again.

As the picture from last week showed, I’ve been working on a new doily. It started with a doodle and just kept growing. It’s made in DMC Cebelia size 30 ecru with two shuttles. This is it so far; it’s six inches across from point to point. I’m not sure about the last round. Does it look like it’s finished? Does it need another round? Is this round how I want it to be?

The local county fair is at the end of the week. I was thinking about entering something but with our vacation I haven’t gotten anything ready. The fair book actually came in the mail the day we left! Not a lot of time to decide on what I could enter. There is only one tatting category – pillowcases – but there are a few other categories that I could enter tatting in. “Tea towels (set of 4 or more) – Miscellaneous”; “Doilies – Miscellaneous”; and “Household – Miscellaneous”. Well, obviously I don’t have time to make four tea towels or a pillowcase (sewing the tatting to the case would take me forever!). I have this doily that might (!) be done. And I might be able to come up with something for the household category (napkin rings? decorated candle holder?). Whatever I decide I have to make up my mind by Thursday afternoon. I’ll let you know what I decided next week.

And now for the vacation! Okay, one picture – or maybe

two. Our first destination was Nashville, TN. Our SIL really wanted to stop here and all of us thought it would be fun. We spent the morning in the Country Music Hall of Fame. So this is me, with shuttles in hand, in the entry hall. This is after we went through the museum and, obviously, after we had gone to the souvenir shop ; )

Mostly my husband and I bought gifts for family but I did find a little something for myself. I did leave home with the glass case for carrying a working project in but I had couple of shuttles to use for my ‘documentary’ pictures. I didn’t want to mess up on a nice project just for pictures! So I thought this little change purse would work great with this in mind.

This worked great! There was nothing to fall out unexpectedly and I knew exactly what I’d get when I reached inside. And I have a little something to keep small take-along projects in that will always remind me of our 2010 family vacation.

There will be more vacation pictures next week. And the results of my decision of what, if anything, I take to the fair.

Tatting Tea Tuesday while on Vacation

I’m on vacation! Woo hoo!

But it’s hot! We were out sight-seeing in the sun and the heat – oh, man! We were so glad to be able to sit down in the cool when we got home!

As I don’t want to carry my regular tatting bag with me, but I do want to have a little something with me, I have had to come up with something else.

I just got a new pair of glasses and the case that came with them presented itself for a new job. I think it’s working well. It’s not exactly light, but carries just what I need, especially since the thread here is size 30. And the size 14 crochet hook won’t poke through ; )

This piece that I’m working on started as a doodle on another road trip about a week ago and has been growing ever since. When I have the chance – and when I think I’m done with it – I’ll share a picture with it laid out all nice and flat.

My tea today tasted suspiciously like coffee, but it was what was available. I did pick up an interesting tea that I’ll be trying next week and sharing with you.

Until then, everyone have a safe and fun summer. Try to stay cool.

The Hatband is Done! TTT 6/29/2010

Yea! The hatband is done! It’s attached to the hat and everything!


This isn’t exactly how I envisioned it on the hat. The white band was to be smaller, not as wide. But when the material was cut and shaped to fit the hat a narrower band was just not going to work, so wide it is. In excitement to get it done (and lack of practice and knowledge) the band has slightly uneven edges. And the tatting would not win any awards. Looking at the finished piece there are quite a few places that don’t really look all that great. I’m still excited about it and I’m going to wear it anyway!!! For at 50 paces no-one will notice it’s not great! LOL! Hopefully there will be no losing the hat where someone might pick it up, so no-one should see it very closely but me!

My tea today was plain ol’ green tea. It was not actually consumed while the tatting was being done though. Tatting time was mostly in the wee hours of the morning and drinking too much of anything before bed is not wise. There was this idea playing around in my head that I just had to see if it would work, so bed was a little later than it should have been! Then there were a few minutes here and there during the day while waiting in the doctor’s office and tea was not available. But the little idea is looking pretty good! I’ll share it in another post.

Until then, may you all have a blessed week with a little time for tatting and tea.

Tatting Tea Tuesday in Red, White and Blue

On this hot Tatting Tea Tuesday I had my tea iced! It’s a sweltering 94 d F with a heat index of 101, making it a good day to stay inside. If I could have I would have stayed home so I didn’t get out any more, but that was not to be. But I’m not working outside, thank goodness!

As I mentioned last week I’m taking a short break from my doily to work on another project. It needs to be done before we go on vacation! And as it’s getting close to Independence Day I thought I’d do this project in patriotic colors. This is going to be the hatband on a floppy brimmed hat and it’s about half done. As you can see the ends have not yet been trimmed. I like to leave those until I’m done and then go around and trim them all off. I’ve always thought that the most aggressive handling of a piece is usually in it’s construction and if an end is going to have trouble, this is when it will happen. By leaving them all to the last I can check all my ends as I finish the piece when I cut the threads. I’m calling this motif #7 of the 25 Motif Challenge, even if it’s not quite done.

These stars are done in size 20 thread; Hakelgarn color 2011 (red) and Manuela color 019 (blue). I am trying to get this done pretty quickly so I’m not using LHP joins. As this is going to be permanently attached to material or a ribbon the back won’t be seen, so those pesky little color spots will remain hidden and unremarked. (If you wonder what I mean by LHP joins I spoke about learning to use them in this post and directions on how to do them are here.) I think this troop of stars will look great on my hat. I’m pretty excited about it : )) I hope to have it done by next week, mounted on the hat and everything. Done or not, I’ll try to have a picture.

The wheat in the picture is from the field outside our house. They’ve already started cutting the fields close by and this field could be cut at any time. We actually came home from work yesterday and were surprised that it hadn’t been cut. This is what it looks like today. Any time now it will be much shorter.

Take some time for yourself with a little tea and tatting, and may all of you have a blessed week.

Doily Restart and Blogging Buddies

Good morning this Tatting Tea Tuesday! It’s a good day – the sun has come out! Yea!!

It has been raining here the last few days, but only about 4 -5 inches instead of the 10 inches they had in Oklahoma City a few days ago. And not as much as a few other places here in Kansas. And now it looks like we have a chance for a few days without rain – maybe. Now it’s just hot and muggy.

I’ve re-started on my doily, this time in Lizbeth Springtime and black, both in size 20. This is as far as it’s gotten after starting it last week. I haven’t taken a lot of time to tat lately. I did finish the round this morning – the tatting part of this Tuesday, while drinking my favorite mint tea. I may have to put off working on this for a little while as there’s another project that needs to be done in a short amount of time. I’ll share that when I have some progress to report on. But I do like the look of this so far.

I thought I’d share a picture of my blogging buddies. And tatting buddies. And TV watching buddies – pretty much when I sit down in my chair buddies. Cat 1 is on the arm and Cat 2 is on the seat beside me. They’d both be on my lap if I let them.

Looking forward to doing a little more tatting this week – I can hope!

Chamomile any one?

Anyone out there like chamomile tea? I haven’t actually tried it myself, though my neighbor really likes it and recommends it. I’m kind of a wimp when it comes to trying some new things and this is one of them. I’m not saying I won’t, just that I haven’t taken that step yet. So this Tatting Tea Tuesday I drink just decaffeinated tea of an unknown brand instead of something exotic or exciting.

The subject of chamomile came up the other day when our neighbor, a really great guy, was mowing our lawn for us. Probably because it was getting pretty tall. And because he’s really a great guy. But when he got to our driveway up by the house he left a large patch un-mowed. He stopped and explained he thought it was chamomile. We both agreed it smelled very good where it was mowed. These plants are where we don’t want plants, though. My DH is planning to get rid of them soon.

I’m not much on plants, herbs or edibles from the field, so I did a little (key word,

little) checking on the Internet about chamomile. I understand that it has been used for medicinal purposes for centuries in Europe and then here in the States as well. It sounds like it could be very good for you as well as quite tasty (so they say). Wikipedia also says that it can become quite a pest because it spreads out everywhere, including in fields where it’s not wanted. I must agree, what’s growing and spreading in our driveway is going everywhere! So whether it’s chamomile or not, smells nice or not, some of it is going bye bye very soon.
I don’t know for sure if the little plant in the picture is chamomile or not but it looks kind of nice there with my tatting. The colors are not quite true-to-life though. The cross actually has purple as the outside, not blue.

The little doily is the center of the one I’ve been working on for several weeks. I’m not very happy with the way it lays now that this much has been blocked. The ds count has to be corrected for it to look better, so this is as far as this one is going. The next one will be in another color with a few more stitches in the pattern!

The cross bookmark is one of my patterns. It will have a ‘tail’ on it soon. I made one just like this for an insert in a wedding card last week but didn’t take a picture of it before it was given away, so I obviously had to make another to share, right? It is made with Lizbeth size 20 thread in Springtime, I think. (The label came out of the middle *ahhhh*) It’s pretty anyway. The outside is also Lizbeth size 20 in purple but which shade I’m also not sure of except it’s pretty close to K States’ purple.

Pretty sad, isn’t it? Until I started this blog remembering what the colors were was only a very minor thing. But sharing what I’m doing with others means keeping track of these things. I’ll have to find a better way of keeping the labels with the threads, won’t I? While I’m making changes I might just have to give chamomile tea a try.

Tatting Tea Tuesday June 1, 2010

Is it Tuesday already? And it’s been two weeks? Oh, my!

Yes, I’ve been lazy. Not really that busy, just lazy. I’ve done a little tatting but not much. I made this on a cabone ring, just messing around. I have no plans for this, I was just seeing what I could come up with.

I did do a little work on the doily. I’ve counted stitches several times so I know the count is correct but it has to be blocked to lay out flat. I’ve gone ahead with it the way the original is made but I’m making adjustments to the written pattern, making a few changes to it so it will lay better right off the shuttle.

It looks okay but I designed this quite a few years ago and have no memory of issues that I had with it when it was done. Also, I didn’t know then a lot of what I know now. There are several things I would do differently with it. It would probably come out looking similar, but I think it would be a lot less work after the tatting is done.

I had a nice, quiet Memorial Day weekend, not going anywhere or doing anything. My husband volunteered to work all three days so I was by myself in the evenings. He also worked slightly different hours which really messed up the days. We had planned to go to western Kansas to visit the cemeteries out there but that didn’t happen. We didn’t visit any cemeteries at all. I’m hoping another weekend yet this summer we’ll make it. Monday afternoon I went over to our daughters’ house for supper and spent the evening. It was a very pleasant time, though I wish my husband could have been there, too. Oh, well, our vacation is coming up soon, when we will have a little more time to enjoy our time together without going to work. At least for a little while.

I think I’ll have another cup of tea and see if I can get a little more done on the doily. May you enjoy your tea and tatting for another week.

Progress and Flowers

I didn’t find where I might have written down the pattern for the doily *sigh*. So I counted stitches and wrote it down. In pencil. And I’ve started making it in Lizbeth size 20 ‘Western Sunset’. It’s shades of red and purples. The second round I’m using red as the chain thread to see how that looks. I’m not sure yet if I’ll like it, but thought I’d try it. The ‘Western Sunset’ was already on a couple of shuttles so I could start right away after I had the pattern done. As there’s nothing fancy in this doily, just one shuttle and ball, it should go rather quickly. No promises about how fast it will get done but it would be nice to have finished by Tuesday :-).

The flowers in the picture are kind of a funny story. I had the idea of taking flowers to church on Sunday (Mother’s Day) and handing them out to all the ladies. We don’t have a large congregation so it wouldn’t be hard or expensive. There were a lot of choices at the store including these bright and cheery colored daisies. When I was getting in the car I realized that daisies really don’t smell all that wonderful, maybe carnations would have been a better choice? But each lady would get several flowers on a stem with the daisies and they were bright and cheery so it was still okay. I left the flowers bundled up but in water overnight. Sunday morning I took the rubber band and the plastic from around them and spread them out a bit so they would be easy to pull out of the vase. And noticed that my fingers were a bright and cheery blue! I was pretty sure none of the ladies at church would want blue dye stains on their clothes or hands. I ended up not taking the flowers to church. Carnations would have been better.

The daisies do look good on my table, though, in their bright and cheery blue water.

Tatting Tea Tuesday after a stormy Monday

It was a wild night last night. There were storms all over Kansas and Oklahoma and a lot of tornadoes came out of them. There are reports of 21 tornadoes between the two states last night. We were fortunate here in Wichita as we didn’t have any tornadoes, but there were a couple that weren’t that far away. There was a tornado warning in Wichita – imminent threat of a tornado – so the plant was sent to the storm shelters. I know my daughter and her family went to the basement. It calmed down here after that but the storms kept moving east and causing damage. I was very glad to see the night over.

Today is a much nicer day here. There will be a lot of people out today checking out the damage and making determination on how strong the tornadoes were yesterday. I hear that the storms are moving east with lots of dangerous potential. I feel for all those people that may have to go through that kind of storms.

Now, on to a much lighter subject. I’m not getting much tatting done yet today, though I might have a chance later. But I’ve been going through a few things – trying to organize (hahahaha!) -and came upon a doily I made years ago. You might have seen it in this post.

I’m trying to figure out if I wrote the pattern down for this. So far, I haven’t had any luck finding anything. So I thought I’d start over and count stitches and get this written out so I can make another one. I’ve got so many more beautiful threads today than I did then. I think this could look pretty cool in colors. Now if I can just get down on paper what I put together in thread!