Friend Julia gave me this gorgeous and useful creation, initiating me into the Sisterhood of the Basket. Acceptance of this beautiful basket also heavily implies (according to Julia) a dedication to Finishing Projects. I’m all over that. In fact, I was already dedicating this pre-fall time to heavy-duty finishing of all kinds of things.



Installment # 1 – three pairs of socks. The center pair is one I started some time ago and decided to finish differently, thinking I had only the single ball of sock yarn. Then, when I was looking for another small bit of yarn to finish the dark socks on the left – made from handspun yarn, by the way – I discovered the primary-colored socks. The knitting required to finish them clued me in on why the yarn hadn’t sold – by the time I finished knitting them, I couldn’t stand the cutesy brightness. “But they’re so YOU!” someone said – mercifully, I’ve forgotten who uttered this. So yesterday I dyed them green – a little too enthusiastically – meaning I used way too much dye for a project that small. Which meant I rinsed them about 40 times, then put them through the wash.



So here they are now. Please note the woodpile posing in the distance behind the socks. I was pretty quiet for a few weeks because I was stacking it – it started out about the size of a small schoolbus and ended up also about the size of a small schoolbus – only slightly more organized now. Not shown is the newly weeded garden – the removed weeds completely fill the compost pile. Nor do you see the results of days of tomato canning and pickle –making. You didn’t think I was sitting on my hands, did you?

book publication!

Here it is, for the culmination of my summer. I worked on it a bit more in the past few months in preparation for publication. There's always a little more tinkering and fine-tuning. “Voices Like the Sound of Water” was officially released last Saturday. It’s my first collection of poems.

I read from the book on Monday night at the Harvest Café in Montour Falls, and if you were there, thank you! There were too many people present to hug and thank you all individually, but it’s a gift to be heard, and I appreciated all the people who turned out to listen (and buy books).

In answer to some of the questions people asked later… Even though poems are short, the collection took about 15 years to write and assemble. They take a lot of editing, rewriting, sometimes re-thinking. There’s humor in them because life is funny, even the serious parts. At least, sometimes. No, I didn’t pay to have them published, nor did I print them myself. The publisher did the design, then invited me to select the cover and end-paper color.

Will there be another poetry book sometime? I hope so. No immediate plans for one, though.

And, most important, Bill does sing off-key, but not in the shower; and he stays – that poem wasn’t about him. Those who know us well, know this has been a pretty difficult summer for Bill, health-wise - so whether he sings or not, I'm extremely grateful he's part of the shower landscape!

Second in importance – the book is available from me or from the publisher. Find information and a sample poem here. http://www.foothillspublishing.com/2011/id28.htm

Here is what a lot of love looks like - 33 hat and mitten sets ready to go to needy children. This summer’s weather, so far, has been a great reminder of winter. 30 of the mittens were made by June; hats were made by Judith, Calina, me – and some came from the estate of marathon knitter-and-hat-maker Dianne (two ns) G. Tomorrow these go into Seneca Santa storage in Watkins Glen.

This is the time of year when everything slowly accelerates. Thanks to the weather and some of Bill’s health-problems like his new not-yet-fully-installed pacemaker, hospital trips and doctors’ visits took up time we needed for gardening, so the garden is a weed paradise without its full complement of veggies. What’s in is getting munched on – by something that’s enjoying it instead of us. Today’s supposed to be a nice day but once again, it looks like rain. But that’s okay, we’ve got one last doctor’s visit – the third this week – to amuse us. Maybe we should call these our new hobby?
However.
Doctors’ visits are good for the production of Seneca Santa hats. I can do one per office visit, two per “short” medical test. My stock of hats, to match a boatload of beautiful mittens sent by June, is rising. Fortunately – for Seneca Santa, at least – we’ve got more visits next week.
And wet weather is good for tatting. I’ve been working on the projects I’m teaching for the Fringe Element tatting group in September. The theme is My Favorite Things - being Canadian, they put a “u” into favorite . Because my own favorite things include books and paperweights, I decided to revise the marble cosy paperweight from my book ‘Baubles, Bangles and Beads” to accommodate a larger marble. And then I went for one even larger. I’ve found a vendor who sells even larger ones, so I plan to look for more next week. I’m supposed to have a poetry book coming out this August - wow! A book I’m not publishing and printing myself! – and I’ve got to meet with the editor, who lives vaguely near the marble guy. Between doctors’ visits, of course.

The other thing I’m teaching is an ornament for a book cover – in this case, a creative journal whose interfacing pages can be personalized with writing and sewn in samples. The idea came to me in a brainstorm. I couldn't take a good picture, because between the sheen of the velvet on the cover and the sparkle of the beads, my poor attempt was more shine than book.
By the way, the folks who organize the Fringe element event are a wonderful group who manage to be well organized and informal at the same time. This event often has room for a few more, too. Find out more at
http://fringetatters.files.wordpress.com/2011/05/2011-tat-days-registration-form.pdf
And because I couldn’t garden, I created a tatted one. This is one of the projects I’m teaching at the IOLI conference in early August. I’ve been sketching and tatting these for a full year; here is the final version.

I haven’t been sitting on my hands, honestly. I’ve been tatting quite a lot, and I’ll have something to show for it soon. I’ve also been doing a whole lot of work of various sorts. A bunch of writing, and a new venture – acting in a melodrama. It came about that at the end of May, I was asked to write an article about the Old Havana Theatre. http://www.oldhavanatheatre.com (The Schuyler County village currently known as Montour Falls was once known as Havana) This brave new enterprise brings another dimension of fun and culture to the area, and I was so taken with the spirit of things that, interview concluded, I blurted out that I’d be happy to help this venture get off the ground, ushering, promoting, whatever… which is how I found myself singing and dancing onstage, playing the train whistle and spooning cool-whip into a pie tin for the obligatory pie-in-the-face conclusion to the entertainment. It was a wonderful distraction from Bill’s medical woes, and in these days of truly offensive political revelations, it’s been wonderful to know that at least someplace virtue triumphs and villains get what they deserve (tastefully)!

Then my friend Laurie came to visit… and we spent a bunch of time together between work and the other friends she also needed to see. On the hottest day of the year - so far - we sat and spun wool in the shop… because the downstairs atmosphere is pleasant and cool. Now I’ve got to figure out what to do with this lovely art yarn Laurie made. Wool is one of our connections; we met in the 1970s at a spinning guild, and over the years, the threads of connection have multiplied.



One thing we did together a very long time ago was to take a dyeing class together. For a while this was Laurie's livelihood; now it's part of mine. Wednesday I mixed up a batch of dye to "revise" some alpaca I'd been gifted with - I was trying for a dark blue-purple but came out with a grayish dusty-grape. I did get wool roving and silk yarn to achieve the wished-for color - it was only the alpaca that wouldn't cooperate!

This morning I found out that I’d gotten into a fiber fest I’d been wait-listed for (as a vendor); mostly because I was too distracted by other work and Bill’s stuff to get my application in on time. So I spent the first part of the day dyeing roving and silk – here’s what my clothesline looked like for a while. Fortunately it was a perfect drying day; so I got the rest of my stuff assembled and packed the car to its gills for a 5:30 am start tomorrow.

I think I may have come up with something. Which is always so much better than coming DOWN with something, right? But I haven’t seen this anywhere before and I find it intriguing.

Finalizing bookmark designs for my IOLI classes in early August, I was finishing a bookmark in pearl tatting and that “what if” intuition kicked in. What if… I used two threads in the pearl tatting method to tat a Josephine chain? I started with one color… hmmm… I could already see it looked intriguing. So I tried two.

Pearl tatting is also sometimes called Maltese tatting. Maltese in cats means gray, so I’m not sure how this form of tatting got dubbed Maltese. Maybe someone will tell me. Particularly because the Maltese ring, while similar to a Maltese (pearl tatted) chain is also quite different. Here is a started bookmark in three colors. I’ll be playing with this design a while longer, but in three colors, you can really see what this chain looks like.



Or almost. What you can’t quite see is the texture head-on. I can’t quite see it either unless I take off my glasses and regard it cross-eyed. (Easy for me, probably more difficult for you. But you can FEEL it.) Using two threads to tat the Josephine, you end up with something that looks more like rick-rack – it’s flatter than the usual Josephine or spiral chain. Which definitely makes it nicer for a bookmark.
Here’s how I tatted it –
Using one thread, I made five of the second half of the stitch, and then a sort of roll(not a stitch but a passing the shuttle over the thread to set the spiral; drop that first thread, pick up the second and repeat.

Try it and let me know what you think?

April was a totally wonderful month – but looking back, it seems to have gone by in a total blur. After a brief recovery from our Finger Lakes Tatting Seminars I was off to Spokane for the Shuttlebirds.

As always, it was totally wonderful! I’m always impressed when a large group of people work together like a beautifully choreographed dance, everyone moving quickly without bumping into anyone else and getting a lot done in a brief amount of time. Because I had the good fortune to be staying with Lillian D., who was this year’s food captain, I know how much pre-Tat Days work went into making the food look effortless, but there was also lots more to do in the kitchen once people started to arrive and it all happened smoothly. Patti Duff is the presiding genius behind this conference, and she manages to do it all, including answering a zillion different questions, without once losing her cool. Here's a photo of one of the projects I taught - tatted mittens. (They'll be in the November Tatting Times.)



Then I had a couple of weeks before the next big thing... and one of the things that happened was having the chance to get one of my favorite knitters started on spinning. Like vampires, spinners (and tatters) always want to get others bit by the same fiber obsessions. Most of the identifying features have been cropped out to protect the innocent... but look! She's very definitely spinning! This picture was taken weeks ago, by now she's probably got everything spun.



I’d been asked to teach at the end of April for the Blue Ridge Mountain lacemakers and tatters from the Keystone Lace Guild. I already knew a few of these ladies – world class tatters. I was also intrigued by the location – Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, a place I’ve always wanted to visit.

So, combining two interests, I spent a lot of time researching tatting at the time of America’s Civil War and it was fascinating. Most of us know that at the beginning of the 1860s, tatting had not progressed beyond the ring and the false chain (a bare thread over which button-hole stitches looking like double stitches were made with a sewing needle). By the end of the War, Madame Riego had introduced the true chain; the proliferation of home sewing machines had encouraged the manufacture of smoother threads - and tatting was off and running.
For this event I created a tatter’s adaptation of the “housewives” soldiers took off with them to war. A real one looks like this http://www.civilwarantiqueshop.com/pi43.htm

It gave me food for thought.

The great day arrived and Bill and I, fortified with months of historical reading, packed the car and left for Gettysburg. Because my time was short, once we arrived we went to the Gettysburg National Cemetery, where we took an interpreted walk with a park ranger, listened to a gaggle of embarrassed teenagers recite the Gettysburg Address under a bust of Lincoln. There was a lot of side-poking, giggling, toe-scraping and other recognizable fidgets of teens under duress – but the speech was incredibly moving anyway.



We also went to the top of Little Round Top, a Union stronghold, and drove around to various memorials, including the “Bloody Angle” where charging Confederate troops were slaughtered as they tried unsuccessfully to breach Union lines. We met a lot of people in costume or uniform, well-prepared for at least five years of high-intensity re-enactment.



The following day, I went to Needle and Thread http://www.woodedhamlet.com/about_us/index.html who hosted the group. This is a beautiful fabric store near Gettysburg, specializing in Civil War era reproduction fabrics. Actually, I’d gone the day before to shop a bit, because I knew I’d be tempted. And I was! And knowing that fiber stuff makes the best souvenirs, I gave into temptation. Darlene and Carl, the owners, were wonderfully welcoming, and their selection of goodies made me think about making one of those Civil War reproduction quilts. Just thinking…. Only thinking! Carl told Bill the wool they stock for re-enactors' uniforms is made by the same mill in England that wove the wool worn by the soldiers 150 years ago. Bill went back to the battlefields and walked around looking at things from the Confederate viewpoint while we had our class.

But I'm not sewing quilts for fun yet, because there’s a lot more tatting to do. I’ve got patterns to proof tat for the next set/s of classes, and a bit of everyday sewing to work on – for example, I’ve got a lot of fabric and a kind of hybrid quilt-batting/foam rubber stuff to turn into chair-pads. And knitting – I did finish two pairs of socks-in-progress, and a good thing too, it’s been cold enough to need them. In the photo, they're being inspected by our "invisible" cat.



Of course, I started another pair, I had a bout of dental work and I was expecting a lot of time in the waiting room. This incidentally didn’t happen, so the new socks are still on my needles. As is – on a different set of needles – a summer sweater I’ve begun for whatever summer festivities arise requiring an interesting shell. I’m not very far along with it, but then again, neither is the season. (Is it ever going to be summer this year? I have my doubts.)




So… back to the tatted housewives. I made bunches (and still have a few left) wide enough to hold tatting needles. This is mine – I’ve been learning needle tatting which is a challenge after the speed of shuttle-tatting. (The motif on the cover will be in the August Tatting Times.)

I take my hat off to those who shuttle tat, particularly those who shuttle tat beautifully and swiftly. Like Carolyn, who was in the class and already finished the project. Here’s Carolyn’s beautiful work. The thread was my HDT in the “Sunset” colorway. Way to go, Carolyn!



I had a wonderful time with the Blue Mountain lace group, multi-talented people who are terrific tatters as well.