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Monday, December 31, 2012

New Year - new projects

About an hour after we got up.
Well the excitement is over for another year. All of the lights will come down after hubby's birthday  (We have to leave them up until the 5th of January for that reason alone.) Gotta love that man of mine. I have been undergoing physical therapy since just before Christmas. These last few visits have been really tough as she has been working on a muscle that needed a lot of loosening up. First few times she touched it I felt like there was a knife going deep into the muscle. This left my left leg aching for the rest of the day. With both of us working on it, the pain is slowly going away. This does explain why some of my yoga poses really did not turn out all that great.

So for the new projects this year, I plan on doing more of the tatted egg pieces that I do for the spring every year. (However, they have been known to end up on my Christmas tree from time to time as well.) I want to explore dyeing with more pastel like colors and maybe doing some kool-aide dyeing as I go along. At this point it is just an exploration of a thought since I have not yet done anything.

The house cleanup has really begun in earnest this year. I have no more distractions and unplanned intrusions as most of my family is settled elsewhere right now. I have not been able to do too much as I was told that I could no longer work "through" the pain as it was getting me into trouble with my back. So I have to work in short bursts and then sit for a while. Good thing there is the tatting to keep me occupied while I "have to sit down" and allow the pain to go away.

One hour later.
I do hope to do more with jewelry this year. I have quite a few pieces floating around in my head but that seems to be as far as they have gotten. I also plan on doing an Etsy shop this year for some of my pieces. It is time that my tatting habit start paying for itself and provide me with income to reinvest in new pieces of beading and threads. This will be a year of exploring the use of beads in tatting. I want to find the right balance between bead and thread so that the tatting does not get lost in what is done.

There is not much tatting in this entry but such is my life right now. I hope to have more as the weeks and days progress this year.

Hope your new year is filled with plenty of thread for tatting and family all around.

Happy Tatting!

Arial - The Tattered Faerie

Thursday, December 27, 2012

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Believe it or not I wrote this post before Christmas and before my son and his family descended upon my house. So below is what I wrote before Christmas and the PS is something I picked up after. 


Well the tree is trimmed and most of the packages are wrapped (NOT). The tree is up and trimmed but I still have a package or two to purchase. The older g-kids are easy to buy for but the little ones are much more difficult. I am posting a picture of the tree trimmed with the new ornaments. I managed to finish up the new ornaments by tatting a ring that I had used in my own pattern for one of my egg shells. I managed to get the pieces threaded together to where they look pretty good. Not all of them went on very easily but I did manage to make a pattern that worked.











I took part in an exchange on one of the lists on Facebook that I belong to. It came by way of a plain brown box through the United States Postal Service. The box contained a pale green handkerchief and sort of seafoam green size 20 Lizbeth thread. There was also a smallish tin box that contained a beautiful shuttle from Georgia Seitz and some red thread. This is not the first shuttle that I have from Georgia but it is the first one bought by someone else for me. The two pictures below are of the contents of the box. I was seriously trying to keep it until Christmas, however, I obviously did not make it. :)


I guess that my next project will be to find the right edging to put around the handkerchief with the thread that I received. Then there comes the Easter egg projects that I do every year. I will begin soon to blow out eggs as I use them to have shells to put my tatting around. Maybe this year I will hand dye some of my own threads to use in the various projects. I will be getting back to the hand dyed threads this spring as my house will be much quieter.

I am making little progress on cleaning up my house and it will be going even slower in the next few weeks. I have been put back on physical therapy by my doctor with this last physical. I am healthy other wise but have to start counting calories rather than portion control. This is seriously when the monster comes out stating that she will not count calories and will attempt sabotage at every turn. I know mentally that it would be the best thing for me but that is not what my heart is saying. I really want to be able to do something where my focus is not on how many calories that I can consume but how I can eat healthier as a way of life and not really think about it. To tell me that I must count calories challenges the inner child to find every possible way to cheat and make it much harder to make the changes necessary to lose this weight. My biggest issue is that my metabolism has really stopped working after so many years of being told that it had to go into fat storage rather than fat burning. I have to find a balanced way to reverse that without issuing the challenge to the inner child to be naughty.

Well that is all for now and most likely for the rest of the year. Here is wishing that all you tatters have plenty of threads for your shuttles and needles to last through the upcoming year.

Happy tatting!

Arial - The Tattered Faerie

PS: The photo here is my latest purchase from our local Hobby Lobby. They finally had the Aerlit shuttles and mine is pink. They also finally had more than just the simple plastic shuttles with a bone and wood shuttle by Yarnology. There is also the thread winder by Yarnology. The two balls of thread are the Lizbeth size 40 waiting to be dyed for the spring tatting.


Boy am I exhausted trying to wrangle the pictures in this post. Most likely, I will not put this many in a post again. But it is what it is. Happy Tatting!