Busy days!

I have been too long away from my blogging. I do have some pictures to share with you all. I believe that the last time I wrote I shared that I was working on a special project for our annual fall ladies gathering at church. As of today I am up to 76  motifs. The jar that I started keeping them in is now half way full of these motifs. I plan on getting them all done and then attaching ribbon to each to form a bookmark.

I took a break at 50 motifs and tatted a cross using the modified pattern from Mary Konior's Visual Tatting Patterns "Black Magic". You can find the modified pattern HERE.

I also tried out a pattern called "Thank You Carnation" by Tammy Rogers that can be found HERE.  I have temporarily attached it to my straw fedora until I can put together the pin backing for this item.

We also have a new member of the family at our house as of a couple of weeks ago. She is called "Baby Girl" for now and is settling in nicely to our home. The first couple of days she spent in hiding because that was what she was used to in my son's home. Seems she really didn't like the little ones so spent much of her day in hiding and then coming out at night. She is finally out during the day and up in our laps when we sit down. She is a tabby / calico mix  because of the markings that are tabby and several color spots like a calico. She loves to climb on things and is now very loving and affectionate. I do find that if anyone else is around she tends to avoid my lap in favor of someone else.

We have spent the last few months travelling on the weekends to visit my son & his family in Nebraska. Celebrated birhdays and holidays. I have gone to local meetings with other groups, one in Sedalia that meets every Monday and one in Versilles which meets once a month. I only go once a month to Sedalia because it is over an hours travel from my home. I am looking forward to a visit from my other son & his family as they have been stationed in Japan since August. I have a grand daughter who I am anxious to meet for the first time since she was born last September.

I had almost forgotten how much trouble this blog can be. I can create the content on my tablet but I have to go onto the computer itself in order to set up the layout. The blog app will load the necessary pictures but they seem to be added to the end instead of where I want them to appear.  So I end this blog knowing that I will just have to re-edit a little later before publishing. (Now that editing is done, it is published. )

Happy tatting

Arial - The Tattered Faerie

TIAS 2013 Days 6 - 9

I seriously owe you guys an update on my project for the TIAS 2013. I managed to get them done but I have been so busy with other things that I just didn't get them posted here.

Day 6

Day 7

Day 8

Day 9

I spent much of my day up in Sedalia with some fellow fiber enthusiasts. I am working on another single shuttle tape lace for another ornament. I found just a few more excellent patterns and hopefully I will end up with a dozen ornaments for my tree next year. Since I have these now, I am also going to work on some new eggs as well for this spring. Not yet sure if I will be dyeing the threads yet but that will be determined when we get to later in the week and my "busy" time goes away.

I will work on getting pictures of the new laces as I get them done. I may seriously think about dyeing threads for a pastel look. I found some really seriously bright colors that may also be good for bright egg patterns. The picture below is the jar that I purchased a couple of weekends ago that had those threads in it.

I also found a very great stash of tatting shuttles in an antique store just not that far from my home yesterday. The big one in the picture below is a "knotting shuttle" used for the bigger threads. I am so happy that I found these and hubby was so great about letting me get them.

Well that is all that I have now. If I could just find some time to relax and play with my threads I would seriously be happy.

Happy Tatting

Arial - The Tattered Faerie

TIAS 2013 Day 5

We are back with another day of TIAS 2013 .  If you follow along with Jane's blog you will see some very creative guesses for what the object will be when we are done tatting.  Here is my latest entry to that group:

Generally I begin working on my blog entries on my  Samsung Galaxy Tab in the blogger app. However, I always have to return to  my computer to add my piture in the right place and even import it into my blog. I did find a way around the picture thing but it still means I have to take extra steps to get this blog fixed up right. It is interesting to note that I will have to go back to working directly with HTML in order to get this to look right on my tablet so I can get it up on my blog as I would like to see it. Gotta love modern technology. It is a really good thing that I am a programmer by training and can deal with this.


Happy Tatting!

Arial - The Tattered Faerie

Continuation of TIAS . . .

Well, I am back from a long weekend in Nebraska. The house was so dry that I ended up with horrible headaches and nose bleeds.

I remembered that I did owe you all a post of my progress on the TIAS 2013 . Jane is now up to Day 4 and the challenges are interesting. The current section lets you use either a "lock join" or a "Catherine Wheel Join" for attaching the chains to the current tatting. I have discovered that I need more practice with my joins as I managed to get most of them except two. Below I am posting days 3 and 4 as my last blog post had days 1 and 2.

So I will be practicing the "Catherine Wheel Join" to help get my skills better prepared for the jewelry I hope to be working on this year.

I am not sure just when I will begin posting any progress on my items but I have plenty of ideas running through my head and I just need to get them down on paper or in thread before I can get things settled in my head. This will also be in conjunction with my doing some new color way patterns.  More on those in a later post.

Happy tatting.

Arial - the Tattered Faerie.

This Year's TIAS 2013

With me wanting to do different things this year, I have decided to  take part in Jane's TIAS 2013 challenge. The link takes you to the introductory page but the links to the documents are found in the left column of her page.

I have also been looking at doing some bead work for the first time this year. I will be looking on "youtube"for the appropriate videoes that will teach me how to do it properly. Not yet sure when I will start loading my shuttles  with beads to do the work but it will be one step at a time.

This has been another busy week and this is the first day that I have actually had time to sit down and play a bit. I joined a seed bead group on facebook that I hope to help me learn bead work much better.  This will be the year when I will take steps to begin working on different types of jewelry to sell. I know that I will not make a fortune with my work but I would like to make enough to just fun the things that I play around with.

For the moment, my containers that have my tatted eggs in them are eluding me. So I will have to spend some time looking for the ones that I have already created so that I can add new ones to them this year. I do plan on dyeing more threads to see if I can get some unique colors going for these projects. As much as I love the thread colors that are available, they sometimes have colors that I don't want mixed in with the color combinations that I do want. I am not sure that I will be able to achieve the pastel colors that I want but that will take some experimentation before I can get the colors I want.

The living room is starting to look much better as I have put away Christmas things and begun to clean up the clutter that is my house. I think that the next place I will work on will be my office since I really need to have a better place to do all the projects that I am planning on playing with in the coming year. Eventually there will be newly painted walls around the house but those will have to wait until it is not so cold outside and I can open the house to paint. It is really bad that we have not done much on the house in the 20 years that we have owned it. Last year we replaced the roof (which had 3 layers of tile in a few places) and redid the chimney so that we could use it this year. It was starting to show signs of toppling towards the top and some of the brick face was beginning to pop off. I feel much better about having the outside work done to fix up the house. This year I will begin by working on the interior to bring it up to date and fixed.

Well, I need to close this out and get on with my day.

Happy Tatting

Arial - the Tattered Faerie

Missed opportunity....

Have you ever had one of those days when you find something that you really want. You try to get it but then something happens and you can't get it. Well, I found a wonderful set of 13 detach-a-spool shuttles on eBay. However, someone is more willing to pay far higher than I for those shuttles. I find them a dream to work with. I hope that the person who wins the bid will treat them with kindness and use them every day. I had great plans for them in my mind with all of the projects that I have planned out for this coming year.

My house is very empty now with the kids in many different directions. My daughter has gone back to school for the semester  My middle son is finally re-united with his family at their first duty stating in Nebraska. The oldest son has been gone since summer to Japan with his wonderful family. So the house contains just me and my hubby now.

Gone is my excuse to put off cleaning up the house because no one is there to interrupt. I am planning on learning some new things this year in tatting. I want to extend my tatting skills by adding beads to my work. There will be beads on the picots first and some sewn on in various locations to begin with. After I am comfortable with that I will slowly begin adding simple beads to the tatted part of my work. I have always been reluctant to load my threads with beads as some seem to do. As beautiful as their work is, the tatting gets lost in all of the bead work done. I want to take the time to make sure that the balance between bead and tatting works for me before I call it done.

So with my physical therapy out of the way until Thursday, here I go jumping into cleaning the house and finding my corner for doing my tatting in again. Oh, I do want to find a warmer corner to do it in for a while. The chair by the front window has become way too cold with the winter chill that is around here right now. I am afraid that if I bundle up I would really lose my stuff in my wrappings. LOL

Well that is all from me for now.

Happy Tatting

Arial - the Tattered Faerie

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