Elizabeth's Giveaway!

Look at these! Aren't they pretty? Elizabeth is giving them away in honor of her 100th Etsy sale. If you'd like a chance to have these for your very own, jump on over to her blog and enter.

I just wish I could enter about 16 dozen times!

LadyShuttleMaker Giveaway

You really, really need to pop on over to Sherry's blog this morning and enter her Monday Mondo giveaway. It's a goodie today!!

Earrings

Yup. Earrings. I've been making 'em. I haven't been using a pattern, just Jon Yusoff's method for covering rings. There are four stitches over the cabone ring between each beaded ring. Oren Bayan metallic threads are the best I've ever used. That said, I must admit that the silver ones were made with DMC metallic. It takes a little longer and I have to work a little looser, but I like the look of the metallic threads. The multi-color and green ones have really tiny beads. I found a new bead store not too far from home, and it had all these really tiny seed beads. I think they are 15 or something like that -- I really can't read the codes on them. The best I could manage was to read the price. That wasn't really tiny. Sigh. They were worth it, though. You should see me when I drop one -- no, you shouldn't; it's too embarrassing. The blue beaded earrings are mine, the green ones are my sister's and the bottom two are for friends of my aunt (those two are garnering me a small remuneration -- enough to buy some more beads). Oh, the reason you can't see the hooks on most of these is that the are nylon hooks. I put beads on the shanks. The green beads barely fit and the blue beads were a total no-go, so my earrings have gold hooks.

State Fair

This post is going to look like a re-run of the county fair -- in fact, I'm using the same pictures, just changing the ribbons. If I wait until I can get all the stuff back together with the ribbons, I'm never going to get this done. There aren't 24 hours in a day any more. I'm certain something has happened to the physics or something and there are only about 6. But -- I digress -- the State Fair was held very nearly a month ago (September 10-20). I demonstrated tatting on four of those days -- three evenings from 6 to 9 and one day from 10 in the morning until 2 in the afternoon (but I took the whole day off work, lovely). Here are the pictures:
I ran out of categories in tatting and had to enter my tatting-covered purse in the "large bag" category. I'm not much of a seamstress, and I don't think they knew I used a worn-out pair of jeans on purpose. I did get a comment on it "Lots of Work!!" Well, yeah. It was interesting to see the difference between entering it in miscellaneous tatting in the County and entering it as sewing in the State (especially when it was the tatting that was new, not the purse). I'm going to be more careful about picking categories if I do this again!

The only new things I entered were a bookmark (there is a category just for tatted bookmarks!) and a "wearable motif". The bookmark is "Honor" from Sherry Pence's The Exquisite Collection of Tatted Butterflies with an added tail to turn it into a bookmark. The judges liked it. That was good, because I like it too. The wearable motif is my original pattern for a t-shirt decoration made with buttons. For this shirt, I made single diamond motifs to match and sewed them on the sleeves.
The State Fair gives money prizes. In the categories in which I entered, they pay $3.00 for a first place and $2.00 for a second place, third and fourth places get ribbons. I got 6 firsts, 2 seconds, and a fourth in Home Arts and 1 first in Creative Arts. I am a rich woman now. [uh-huh, as if] I got one check for $22.00 from Home Arts and a check for $3.00 from Creative Arts. Considering it cost me $11.00 to enter all that stuff, ending up with $25.00 felt pretty good. In the first flush of ...well, actually, greed... I thought maybe I'd get out the list of categories and start now to make something in every one. But then I noticed one was "tablecloth - tatting". Uh-uh, I'm not tatting a tablecloth! My sister suggested I purchase a small doll table and make a tablecloth for that. I don't think the judges are that liberal, really, I don't.

Holloversary Mystery Giveaway -- Aileen's Wicked Tats is de-stashing! Another place to make a comment and maybe get a goodie. Isn't this fun? She's got all the requirements right there, but be sure you make your comment by October 29 (maybe you turn in to a pumpkin if you don't??).

Thread Again!

My sister has been dying things again. She did a set of tie-dyed sheets to enter in the Fair (which won a blue ribbon). While she had all those dyes out and mixed, I ...um... let her use some on thread for me. Just because I'm nice, you know. I've ended up with a wonderful mix of marine blues and greens she calls "mermaid" and another dark rainbow in size 80 thread. The other two are pinks and reds on a size 30 Cebelia base. I didn't have anything but a tiny little plastic core (same thing the size 80 came on) to wind the reds on. So -- I have ended up with a Bermuda Onion. I've been unable to make myself use it -- don't want to mess up my onion! I have used the mermaid, though. I made a t-shirt decoration and sewed it on a white t-shirt to enter in the State Fair. OH! That reminds me, I've gotta run -- I've taken the day off work to demonstrate tatting at the fair -- not sit here and rattle on like a pea in a boxcar!

LadyShuttleMaker Giveaway!

Hey! Look at this! Sherry, LadyShuttleMaker, is giving things away every Monday. Can you believe that? [She must not have that pack-rat hoarder gene I've got.] You do realize that means hand-dyed threads, ceramic shuttles, original watercolors, tatting books, bits of tatting, and other goodies, right?

All you have to do is go over to her blog Tatting Tales - All Things Tatting http://www.ladyshuttlemaker.blogspot.com every Monday and leave her a really good comment -- or a plain vanilla one if you don't happen to have a really good one churning around in your brain. I'm leaving her banner on the side-rail until she's cleared out all her stuff -- or at least until she comes to her senses and starts hoarding it. Click on the banner and head over there. She's always got something interesting to say...

Well...oops!

No tatting for a little while. I did an oops. Monday night I was slicing bread for supper. That's not all I sliced. Really, I can't imagine how my thumb came to be there -- not at all, really! What was it thinking?! I think thumbs must not have any brains -- at least mine don't. My sister took me and my thumb down to the "InstaCare" (what a misnomer -- we were there more than an hour and dinner was ruined). First they made me wait behind curtain number 2. This guy whose razor hasn't worked for at least three days must have been the winner. Oh -- nope. He was the doctor. He filled my thumb full of lead...er...no,no, he filled it full of some kind of numbing agent. He did it with a NEEDLE (shudder) . Sadist. Then he demanded someone set up a suture kit for him. (He apparently couldn't open the cupboard and take out a box and put it on the tray by himself. I hoped it was a sign he was just uppity -- not inept. He was gone forever. I thought might be thinking the box would open itself if he waited long enough. Nope. He finally came back, then spent 10 minutes complaining that it was some kind of disposable kit. The nurse told him they were out of the regular kits and this was all they had left. His response, "Well, that's not a good enough answer." What kind of answer could he want? They all ran away from home? There really are some of the others, but we don't like your patient? The others are being saved for the best doctors? Doesn't matter -- that's the only answer they had to give him. Grumbling, he decided he could use "that piece of crap". Great. I want my thumb fixed with crap -- oh, yeah. Still, fix it he did. Stitched it right up, and tied the knots with a couple of hemostats. It was beautiful to watch him tie those knots -- 30 years experience, he said. "Wow," says I, "I'd certainly like to have a couple of those hemostats." "Why would you want 'em?" he mumbles. "Oh, because I can use them with my tatting!" "Whazzat?" he says. Heathen. I told him it was lace making with a bunch of little knots, and I could use those for short thread joins and stuff. He looked at me like I was speaking Ancient Egyptian. (I could have told him tatting wasn't that old.) Still, when he finished he told the nurse to give me the hemostats -- since they were disposable anyway (maybe they melt in the autoclave?). They didn't look disposable to me -- see:

I should get the stitches out next Monday. Plenty of time to still demonstrate tatting at the State Fair!

Ornament Rings

This is a set of winter decorations. I'd use them on the Christmas tree, but they'd do just as well in the window or hanging from the ceiling.

Hanging from the ceiling actually sounds pretty good -- like they've been to a really wild party. YeeeHaaawwwww...party on, dudes. Who's got the music?...

Wait...what was I talking about? Oh, yeah, these ornaments.

All of the white ones are made with Coats Dual Duty Button Cotton. The red and green ones are made with Lizbeth size 40 in Christmas red or Christmas green. All of the white and red ones are either directly from Jon Yusoff's Snowflakes Collection or are adaptations of those patterns to get them to fit into the silver bangles. The green ones are either directly from DMC's Tatting for Today or have been adapted to fit into the bangles. It does seem strange to be making Christmas ornaments in August (given that the temperature outside is upwards of 90 F). These are for a gift. I don't think the person who's getting these even knows this blog exists, though. Sometimes it's a good thing to labor in obscurity, right?

Fairly Floating

The earrings I tatted, using Jon Yusoff's techniques for covering a ring (and inspired by her earrings), had to be entered in the Creative Arts area. I ran out of categories in tatting -- they didn't have one for jewelry. These were entered in Creative Arts: jewelry, mixed media. They had to be mounted on a card to be entered. My so-called cards were cardboard cut from a boxed-something-that-came-in-the-mail covered with cloth. I stitched the earrings to the fabric so they wouldn't get lost.
Both sets were made for my niece (who modeled them in my original post about entering the Fair). The purple ones (made with size 30 Cebelia and inexpensive clear glass beads) won a first place and a high blue (that is, considered for sweepstakes). Those are my own favorites, but apparently the judges thought differently.

The high school my niece is going to has black and white for their school colors (somebody is in dire need of a dictionary to look up the meaning of color, in my opinion [ooooo, maybe it's me?!]). The second pair is made with size 30 white Cebelia and tiny black glass beads with a larger black drop bead in the center. The metal rings I used had a little hole there, so I had to attach something to it! I have to tell you my first reaction was confusion, then total amazement when we saw these in a glass case at the Fair. I really did win all the marbles: a blue ribbon, high-blue, sweepstakes, judge's choice, and Best of Show! Who'd'a' thunk? With the best of show I got a recipe book and this nifty bread basket. It has a square porous ceramic stone inside a zippered bag. The stone goes in the microwave for a specified amount of time, into the zippered bag, into the basket and keeps the bread warm. Wow!-- it would be even better if I still made bread!