Although it's been an almost-delightful winter weather-wise, with higher than usual temperatures offering more opportunities to go outside un-coated than we seemed to have last summer, it's been a while since I'd worked on Seneca Santa hats and mittens.  A friend, Jen, made the most gorgeous kid-friendly hats out of an assortment of donated yarn, none of it terribly promising until it fell into her hands.  That inspired me to work on what I had left, buying more yarn when I found it, and digging deeper into my stash...  Then a neighbor's flood prompted her to give away a treasure-trove of beautiful yarn.  (It always strikes me as nothing short of miraculous that just when yarn for this project is so sorely needed, it arrives!(  Some of it got wet, but it's acrylic, and I've been drying it. Another friend sent some mittens she'd knitted over the winter, and I knitted a few more and bought some magic gloves.   The result - because I'm finished for a few months - was that I made 28 hats, some of them finished with mittens, some going to a fourth friend who will make mittens to match, but doesn't like making hats.  So these are some of them - some matched with mittens or gloves, some with yarn for future mittens. 



I've also been doing a whole lot of sewing.  Some has been in anticipation of future lace-related events, additionally fueled by the idea that I might not have time or energy to sew a little further down the road this year.  And I got the idea of making zippered bags like these, bought a bit more fabric, and I've now got an assortment of many bags like this, all about 7 1/2 inches square, lined with inner fabric as interesting as the outer fabric.  I took them to one lace event where they proved really popular, so I made more.  An about-to-close quilt shop discounted Kaffe Fassett-designed fabrics, and I saw some super-hero fabric at JoAnn, and some pretty upholstery fabric and some other good stuff in my stash...  so I've now got about two dozen of these waiting to be appreciated.  I'll have them at the Tatting Seminars in the Finger Lakes next month, a.k.a. "Lodi."  Lodi is the town where the event is being held. 

 Then I got hurt the past week.  I haven't been officially diagnosed yet, but it's pretty clear to me what's happened and that surgery is likely to be in my immediate future.  I'll find out this coming week.  But hurting and somewhat afraid of what's going on, I needed comfort, which I found in a charming old beginner tatting book, annotated by its previous owner.  This is the start of a doily, in Lizbeth size 40, "Falling Leaves" and I'm trying to use split chains and split rings to avoid ending the continuous thread as much as possible, though it won't be entirely possible.  This doily is tersely marked "made" but the next doily in the book, just a tad larger but  a fussy confection of ring-and-chain motifs and way too many picots for my taste apparently took the previous tatter about 11 weeks, with her start and ending dates noted above the pattern.  Other patterns have notations like "Medallion [spelled freely] # 9, 8:45 Sunday night" which made me page through the group looking for medallions - there weren't any, not really.  Guess I'll see how long this doily really takes.  I started it last night, and when I was tatting it, I'm glad to report I wasn't in any pain and only worried about getting the stitch counts consistent.