April was a blur of tatting events – our own Finger Lakes Tatting Group’s Tatting Seminars in the Finger Lakes, and then on to Spokane for the Shuttlebirds Tat Days. Both fun – although “fun” seems a lame word for a chance to meet with extraordinary and amazingly talented people whose scope of creativity starts with tatting and balloons out to a range of disciplines and abilities.

Here’s what I taught at Lodi – Sand dollars and rainbow trout. One of the fish shown is a coelacanth, a once-thought-to-be-extinct fish discovered in the early 20th century to be quietly minding its own business off Madagascar or someplace.

Our own April gathering is traditionally preceded here by an intense month of house-cleaning, studio-cleaning and other preparations. Thread dyeing is part of things. [Which itself is preceded by skeining, counting and sorting, and followed by cooking (the thread) rinsing, drying. labeling and packaging.] Also working on the various projects one last time to be sure they worked. Also shopping, cooking, planning, spending time on the phone with people who had either just decided to come or just decided they were unable to come as planned.

A whirlwind of tatting and people and moving things around… and then more whirlwind on the other side of the country, and finally back home… with this year’s third bout of bronchitis, this time accompanying a cold. Which Bill caught, getting sick enough to require an ambulance ride and several days in the hospital.

Not able to think about much else, I worked on assembling and quilting a summer quilt. This one is for a fundraising auction our synagogue will have in two weeks. I’d done the quilt squares some years ago, and there they were, all trimmed to size and ready to go together. Which was the work of a week, and glad I am to have finished it. We liked it enough to have put a reserve bid on it ourselves. Look how green it suddenly became around us! Daffodils are in bloom across the yard, the garden is started, I learned to trim raspberries the other day so now those are in order too. We've started spending every moment we can outdoors. We've waited for this nice weather for a long, long time!