We’re snowed in again – which frankly, I love (or would if it didn’t feel like the flu has returned for an encore). Nevertheless, I’ve been having a blast. Today I wrote an article that I feel politically much in tune with. As a journalist, my job is to present information without expressing the merest shred of personal opinion, but when I get a chance to write about something I really believe in – which fortunately happens often – I feel particularly optimistic about life in general.

My friend June is in town, and brought some Seneca Santa mittens with her. We had an opportunity for a nice long visit and sort through the yarn bins. I’ve been doing a few hats now and then when I have time. The yellow ones, incidentally, were mostly made by my friend Jennifer, who knitted a long, tubular scarf that had no home. She gave it to me, and because I had some of the same yarn, through the magic of crochet turned the scarf into 8 hats on a different wintry morning. They matched well with many of June’s mittens.

We drank a lot of tea, she made a pair of mittens while I crocheted 7 more hats – hats go so much more quickly than mittens. And voila! We now have 14 finished sets. June, who every year makes dozens of mittens, stubbornly refuses to dedicate her entire life to this project – she really does have a life completely apart from knitting. I think I’m going to have to spend some time in the next weeks making some myself. I’m hoping that if I can do some on the knitting machine, maybe the Thursday knitting circle could sew them up. The idea is always to get the first batch of mittens out the door and into summer storage before the tatting conference and - yikes! It’s only four weeks away. I’d like to have a bit more than 14 sets to send off. Each year I pledge myself to make or facilitate at least 100 sets, so any way you look at it, I’m a bit behind.

Next on the agenda – look at the sage wool shawl whose ends you see behind the mittens. It began its life as a beautiful piece of wool whose remnant was given to me by a talented needlewoman who was purging her fabric stash. What it needs is an array of tatted hearts so it may be sent to a tatter who was the unlucky passenger in a car hit by another car and is now recovering from this serious accident. I hope to send this, too, on its way before our April tatting conference.

I’m also at work on a new tatting book, hinted at in the last Tatting Times. I’m really excited about these new patterns – I’ll show a few of the results when I’ve got more of them tatted… and after I tat a few hearts.

Working like mad on too many projects to admit to… (with fever breaks in bed with the cat and a lot of hot tea). I’ve been cleaning my studio, an ongoing project that will probably take the rest of my life. I found a humiliating number of knitted socks in progress, but in several cases, I was embarrassingly convinced that I only found half the project, so I did the only logical thing – set them aside and began another pair of knitted socks. The new pair has a chance of getting finished…. Sometime in March, I’m absolutely sure.
For several weeks I’ve been tatting a lace edging for a tablecloth. I was astounded to learn it would be 13 feet of edging before I was done. Now I’m done. Ginny W has the tablecloth; her mom did the embroidery and we’re all adding tatted flowers to the ornamentation. This is going to be auctioned – and it’s already a beauty (even without the edging). The auction proceeds will help support our annual convention. Somewhere along the line, I realized I could keep things from tangling by winding the edging around a piece of cardboard, measuring here and there for the corners. The edging is the simple one everyone learns at the beginning of tatting:
R: 5-5-5-5 CH: 5-5 Repeat until you’re crazy. For some of us this doesn’t take long.



This is what 13 feet of edging looks like. Ginny’s so smart, I’ll let her do the final joins after she inveigles her mother into sewing it on.
The homeless quilts are now in Kansas City, to be given away during the homelessness marathon, February 23-24 (public radio stations and several public TV stations as well – if you can get Pacifica, tune in between 6 pm central time and 8 am the following morning). Sixteen quilts, in case anyone wants to know, filled 4 large black plastic garbage bags. I was told they’d cushion a lot of the broadcast equipment on the ride out.
I made 14 of those quilts, and would you believe the cat came downstairs in the middle of the night and tossed fabric scraps hither and yon? Clearly the only thing to do was to work some of them into quilt squares, which takes more time than I would have believed possible. I need those elves when the shoemaker is finished with them – at least to keep the cat in line. A week’s worth of sewing while I’ve had the flu resulted in enough squares for one quilt - but a mountain more was discovered - I'm sure the cat did it just to frustrate me. I couldn't have quite THAT much around, could I?



Here’s the culprit, resting from her labors. On Bill, who has a slight fever. We’ve been flu-ish. When I went to the clinic Friday, the nurse said brightly, “Oh! Real flu! We haven’t seen much flu this year.” I think what she meant was, “Everyone else was smart enough to get flu shots, you suffering from stupidity as well as bronchitis?” But being a trained health professional, she was much too kind to say so.

I've now completed 10 homeless quilts - the three most recent are festooned artlessly around the messy studio in front of a leaning tower of completed ones in my messy studio. I haven't been cleaning up, just cutting, sewing, tying - and then on to the next one. I figure I've got enough materials and enough energy to make maybe four more. In my "spare" time - this being a snowed-in day without other work - I also completed 8 Seneca Santa hats and worked on a totally pedestrian tatting project - tatting 13 yards of edging for a tablecloth. It may be pedestrian but it's also quite inspiring... that is, I'm very inspired to finish it and move on to something else, but alas, it is not the work of a moment!

Not knowing who was reading this in the lead-up to the holidays, I kept my head down, with four major sewing projects going, as well as some knitting. I'm not as enthused about sewing - though I've sure got to do a lot of it! - so I kept my nose to the grindstone, meaning to photograph all these projects when they were done. Then I got excited about wrapping them and getting them to their recipients – and then it was too late. Since nearly everyone now has their presents in hand, I can explain them, even if I can't show them. Take my word for it, they did come out rather nicely! They included potato-baking bags, made from cotton fabric and batting, for baking potatoes in the microwave; patchwork pot-holders with fairly complicated patterns, and for my sweetie, wool socks - red of course, because as everyone in our Thursday night knitting group could recite in chorus, red is WARMER.

Now, in January, things have moved on… a bit. We’ve weathered the holidays, a touch of flu, a snowy Roc Day. The lambs we began three spinning meetings ago (this is a Lion Brand KAL pattern) got finished. Mary’s is the pink one on the left, mine, using some roving I was presented with by a visitor from England on the right I changed the pattern to do the whole thing in the round and minimize sewing – a lot of parts were knitted-on instead. When I finished, I had used 13 knitting needles. Not quite sure how that happened. Also, because of the variegation, some beholders thought the lambie was really a piglet. Then we gave ourselves a winter challenge – spinning a set of wild batts we each made from various bits of fleece we all threw into the center of the room, divided, then carded. We each ended up with about 7 ounces in two colorways – one was a sort of green/blue/white blend, the other was an orange/brown set that spun up looking like a dog’s breakfast. More on those later.


I’ve undertaken some reorganization in the studio – but the “before” photo was so horrendous, I don’t dare show it. Can we take it as read that it was awful? The still-disorganized progress might be nothing to write home about, but it is a whole lot better! I produced a tatting booklet called “Baubles, Bangles and Beads,” – here’s a photo of some of the projects. Anyone who’s done design work can well imagine the amounts of time, thread, dropped beads, projects that got scrapped because they didn’t turn out and bad words this entailed. But I was really, really pleased with the results. One project that didn’t get in because I misplaced it three times led me to think I needed to design something different – and I liked that a whole lot better.


Came up with three projects for the Finger Lakes Tatting Seminars in April – Marcia will teach one of them (the carrots). And take a look at these grapes – I believe I may have invented a new technique for making Catherine Wheels with a continuous thread.


We’ve had a bunch of snow, so there’s been a lot of creative time. The current focus, between tatting and tatting, is making homeless quilts. (These would have looked a lot better if I'd photographed them from further away.) That is, the quilts are for homeless people, though since they’re not yet currently connected to the individuals who need them, I suppose the quilts are themselves homeless. I was gifted with a godsend – bags of gorgeous fabric from a hobby seamstress with elegant taste, which helped a lot. Thanks, Edna! Her stash even included a length of fleece I could use as a warm layer. That quilt is the only one that’s not a “quillow” – the rest are, because you know how personal your pillow is, and it seemed like a good thing to combine warmth with a pillow. So far, I’ve made 7, and my friend Jean J. has made one. I want to keep going on this project for at least another week, but I seem to be running out of quilt insides....

Tatting up a storm? Oh, I really, really dislike that phrase. It’s generally said by people with no imagination who simply want to convey their understanding that I’ve been tatting quite a bit. I like watching storms – from inside – but I wouldn’t like to think I’m the cause of all that sound and fury.
But here’s some of what I’ve been doing. I’ve got to prepare this month and next for about five teaching occasions, which means I absolutely have to engage in one of my favorite activities for extended periods of time. Next year, Tatting Times is celebrating its 20th Anniversary, and I want to celebrate by going to as many tatting gatherings as possible!
This is part of a proposal for next spring – the blue at 12 o’clock is a button-based bag; at 3 o’clock is a gingko leaf from my book “Tatting Turns Over a New Leaf.” This past Saturday, the Finger Lakes Tatting Group got together at Graceful Arts (here) and people found at least four ways of tatting this leaf, including the way I wrote it down, which had an error, but works anyway. At the bottom is the whirligig ornament from my “Tatting With Buttons 2.” I forgot how pretty it can be until Hopie showed me last August her versions in the colors of the Southwest. I decided to go for secondary primaries here and a bit of contrast. I think I’ll be making this a few more times for presents this coming season. Lastly, at 9 o’clock is a tatted mitten. I found a new way to tat a foundation chain for Scharf-style leaves. Instead of using paper clips to hold a space, I now tat part of a lock chain, which leaves a small picot in the middle of a chain that may be accessed from both sides.

Read this blog over the years and you may think I’m obsessed with firewood. Certainly, it forms a big part of our lives this part of the year. Carrying in wood, stoking the stove, carrying out ashes, cleaning up around the fireplace – it can all keep you pretty busy. After the big purple machines finished in October, there were about24 small and medium-sized tree trunks piled on the lawn, yesterday my friend’s husband Nate brought his chain saw and buzzed through them. I saw there’s real skill and strategy in cutting up logs. Because most of these are red pine, they’re going to have to season for a very long time before they’re safe to burn. I worked with Nate to pile them up – we think it’s something over a cord of wood, since the logs took up three pallets plus a bit more. It was good exercise – now I’ve just got to figure out how to get pine tar off a good sweater.



So that’s where I’ve been and here’s where I’m going – in addition to more tatting. I was gifted with about 2 pounds of lovely Jacob’s fleece roving by Bill’s daughter Margaret, and I’ve been itching to get my fingers on it. Unfortunately work and other deadlines intervened – and I’ve had to wait a bit. And I’m off to work now, so the wait goes on.

I am not a quilter. I’m a fiberholic, and that’s different. The result of my fiber acquisition/stash-taming efforts – it toggles back and forth between them – is this quilt show, which was a feeble effort to use up fabric stash and impose a little order. The total silliness of this effort was brought home to by the obvious need to buy more fabric in order to use up some stash… so the total amount of fabric left is only slightly depleted. I don’t like sewing, but I seem to be engaged to my sewing machine… if not actually wedded to it for long periods of time.


Last Monday was the day to hang everything on the winery walls. My boss kindly gave me a light day’s work to accomplish this. Bill came and helped, mostly standing on the ground saying helpful things like “higher on the left. No, HIGHER!” while I teetered on a ladder, reaching for areas I really should have gotten down and moved the ladder to first. Fortunately, it was all quickly hung, without disaster. Eighteen pieces.

The opening was officially on Thursday. I did a bunch of cooking, went to work, came home, changed clothes, came back and paced nervously. I think this opening set a record for being among the smallest. But I sold three pieces, including the two big ones on the back wall. Those are the ones on the top photo. One other quilt has now left – I didn’t get a chance to photograph it, but it will be given to a new mother to welcome her new baby. I’ve got a new quilt to put up in its place, one that didn’t make it into the show.



Moving the season right along, I’ve done little to tame the mess in the studio. This is why. I signed up, kinda last minute, to vend at a crafts fair tomorrow that’s supposed to be the largest one in the region. Went into gear knitting mittens with this great local wool – rather, the sheep whose wool this is graze about a mile uphill from my house. Here are mittens in progress – they take a lot of finishing before they become double-thick reversible mitts. There’s a lot of stages in knitting these mittens, including knitting, sewing, fulling, shaping, putting one mitten inside the other….



And voila! Here are 11 finished sets, atop one corner of a newly re-covered couch. For those who know me, this fabric was carefully chosen to match the coloration of our invisible cat. In case of an unexpected instance of extroversion, she can sit here and remain more or less invisible. Not with the mittens, though. They’re leaving town.

Last year, I challenged Tatting Times readers to see how many shuttles they could empty (by tatting the small ends. Of course, I was, as usual, trying to pack too many things into too short a time to take the dare myself, though several people discovered several hundred shuttles occupied with forgotten bits of thread. Knowing I, too, had to do something about this situation, in the August Tatting Times, I offered this small and easy pattern - which quickly went viral! I almost think we need a support group of people working on it. Yes, it does leave you with a lot of ends – but sewing them in truly doesn’t take long, and it’s a wonderful take-along meditative experience. Here’s how far I’ve gotten. Pam Freck made hers a bit more organized – she groups her flowers into sevens and tats a border of solid-colored flowers around each group.
Here’s the pattern – the center ring is R: 5-5-5-5-5-5 (five picots, plus the start and end of the ring; then CH around: 6-6+ (six times). You need a little more than a meter of thread per flower. You can keep going forever… Or stop whenever you’ve reached something of a recognizable shape.
When the big purple tractor was finished clearing scrub and trees, this lovely maple was revealed in its fall splendor… it was almost worth all the trouble and expense of having the junk hauled away to see this beauty!