One of this year’s major accomplishments was finishing “Tatting By The Book,” my second collection of bookmarks. While I was designing and tatting the bookmarks, at the back of my mind was this worry about the book’s cover. I couldn’t come up with an image of how it might look and this bothered me – all my ideas took me back to the same cover as the bookmark collection I did in 1997. Then I found this copyright-free illustration and altered it – after that, everything simply came together. Everything I wanted to get in managed to fit - all 17 of them! The printer did a great job – and I was able to get the first orders out in time for Christmas.


Secret Santa was terrific this year! Carol A. sent me some incredible presents – including this lovely fellow – he’s young, lively, and his round tummy says he likes chocolate almost as much as I do! He does seem to be a leprecaun, so I looked up Irish names and settled on Flannan - which means, if I recall correctly, "little red one." He accompanied a lot of lovely things including a pair of my favorite shuttles, chocolate (I got to them first!) a sparkly bag, beads, Lizbeth threads, including one color I haven't tried yet; a neat tin (with more candy) and a lot more good things.



Actually got my Christmas presents all done with a little time to spare – which I used to begin another project, of course. This was legitimate, according to my lights, anyway - because it fit my goal of using up “stash” yarns, in this case two yarns I’d been stockpiling that suddenly acquired a magnetic attraction to each other. This will be a shawl… literally wrapping up last year’s New Year’s resolution to make a significant dent in my stash of yarns. This year’s resolution has the same general nature but has to do with fabrics. I’m not much of a quilter, but somehow I’ve established a stash which has gotten seriously out-of-control. I’ve signed up to do a quilt show next November, so I expect I’ll be busy at the machine for much of the next few months.