County Fair 2013

The County Fair was held at the end of August.  I didn't have very many things to enter because I was busy with other not so fun stuff.  Just to heighten the tension (okay, pretend you were feeling some), here's the crochet first:  First place blue ribbons on a ripple afghan and a small white pineapple doily (which if you look closely you can see they mislabeled.  We entered at the same time and they put my sister's name on it -- she let me keep it anyway).

The other piece of crochet is an 18" (45.75 cm) diameter white pineapple doily.  It not only got a first place blue ribbon, it got a "considered for sweepstakes" high-blue ribbon.  Yeah, I'm pretty pleased with it.

I only entered three tatted items in the County Fair.  The categories are more limited than the State Fair.  I got a first place blue ribbon on the blue doily of my own design. (Well, okay, it was the shuttle's design.  I just loaded the thread and let it take me where it would.)

I entered these snowflakes as "wedding accessories" by claiming they were bride favors. Really, they need to add more categories!  The snowflakes were originally done for the IOLI convention in Salt Lake this year.  Bonneville Tatters (of which I am a member) donated them to the convention attendees.  I turned in somewhere around 40, but got sidetracked with all this other stuff and didn't attend any of the meetings in time to turn in the others.  So...what else?...I entered them in the fair.

The blue Christmas ornaments, which I entered as a set, also got a blue ribbon and considered for sweepstakes.  I know I designed the one on the right, but I'm not too sure about the one on the left.  I've made so many of the one on the right that I'm certain about it, but if anyone recognizes the one on the left as being someone's pattern, I hope you'll say so.  I want to give proper credit -- and I want to make more!  

The rest of the family did well at the County Fair too.  We brought home lots of ribbons. 

October, already? Oh, even a different year.

Just dipping my toe back in.  It's been more than a year since I posted anything -- and what a year it's been. I think we finally have Dad settled in a nice assisted living place less than 2 miles from our house. We've been using weekends to clear out his house and garage (5.5 TONS of metal taken to the recyclers -- Dad was a welder and made wonderfully creative metal birds).

I've been making little Halloween pieces for a friend's fundraiser this October.  I've made ten of Sherry Matthews' pumpkins (five with beads and five without) two of Mark Myers "Scary Ghost" without picots, and two of Jeff Hamilton's "Ripley The Ghost". Then I got this idea to make a skeleton.  Martha Ess has a really great pearl tatted skeleton on her website, but it's a bit big and more complicated than I wanted to make for a donation thing. So, I borrowed Jeff Hamilton's basic ghost body and added skinny arms and legs made with double-double stitches (or at least, my version of what I understand them to be). What do you think?

Addition:  Way cool! Jeff Hamilton just said he liked the skeleton and it would be okay to share.  Now I just have to be as good as he is and get the thing written up -- fortunately he's done most of the work.  I just have to figure out how to write the weirdness I did to be able to tat it all in one round and attach the legs the way I wanted to.  I'm wondering now if another set of split rings wouldn't be better than the chain.  I'll have to test that out.


P.S.  Don't think you're not going to have to read about this fair this year just 'cause I posted Halloween first (and before October!).  HA.  The fair post is coming...

State Fair

The State Fair is over and I'm starting on entries for next year.  So far what I have are really ambitious ideas!

I demonstrated tatting at the Bonneville Tatters table in the Home Arts building four times during the Fair:  twice with Tonya, another Bonneville Tatters member, and once with my sister and my niece (and once with Judy, but I don't have a picture with her).  My sister has been tatting for 5 days (not all this year!), and when we went to tat on the last day of the Fair, my niece, who is ten, had been tatting for about 2 hours.  She made a lot of little short chains -- she called them worms.  Some guy asked her what their names were.  She gave him a strange look then said, "Wormy and WormyTwo."  She proudly placed them under the clear plastic cover on our table with all the other tatting bits and bobs.

This is the first year I've entered as "Advanced Amature" -- according to the Fair rules after entering for five years you've got to move up.  I did it a year early because I figured if I was going to enter stuff I'd designed, that had to be advanced.   I entered eleven pieces of tatting and came home with nine first-place blue ribbons and two second-place red ribbons.  It cost me $11 to enter, and I also came home with a check for $31.  Not a high-paying proposition, but certainly a lot of fun.

 The ornaments and the butterfly are the same ones I entered in the County Fair, but I had to add a bookmark tail to the butterfly to enter it in the State Fair.  I added a coil-less safety pin to the back of the Grapes from Karey Soloman's class at Shuttlebirds to qualify it for the wearable (flat) tatting category.


There are more categories in the state than the county, so I made some new things for the State this year.  In the jewelry category I entered a necklace and matching earrings which are really Patti Duff's lanyard pattern with smaller thread and bigger beads.  I found these beads that look like crumpled tinfoil, and really like the way they turned out.    For the Halloween suncatcher, I used the center of Linda Davies' new Classic Doily fitted into a bangle with black thread.  Then with invisible thread (it was 3:00 in the morning on entry day!) I sewed on my Ripley the Ghost made from Jeff's Hamilton's pattern. (Thanks so much for sharing, Jeff!)   It turned out really well (especially for 3:00 in the morning).

The other new things I entered were a Tatted card (I sewed the Celtic motif on a card with invisible thread about 2:30 in the morning), and the swirled square motif I made up a few months ago.  The comment I got on the card was that white on white was not a good idea (lots of things seem like good ideas at 2:30 in the morning), and it was not evenly blocked -- too true.  The comments on the motif were that I pulled some of the rings too tight.  It probably looks a little warped, but second place is still cool.


The Classic Doily by Linda Davies that I test-tatted for her was large enough to enter in the centerpiece category.  It was very well received by the judges -- they like classic and white, and they liked the pattern of this doily.  Thanks, Linda!  I also entered the two-toned purple doily in the "doily" category.  Unfortunately the pretty sunset doily I entered in the County Fair was in the same category as the purple one in the State Fair and it's one entry per category.  I would have entered the other as an edging, but the only edgings categories are for hankies and pillowcases.  (Gotta get working on those for next year).

The lovely Utahraptor got a nice blue ribbon.  I got a note on that one, too.  It said if I'd done a better display it would have been considered for sweepstakes.  Well, rats.  I didn't do this display.  The people who took in entries at the fair pinned it to this board with big "T" pins -- I didn't have any choice in the matter (boy do I sound grumpy and unappreciative and sour-grapeish or what?!).  Anyway, next year I need to make a stegosaurus and put it on a proper display board with invisible thread, not with "T" pins. 



Finally, there's my lone piece of crochet.  I chose the pineapple doily after fussing about it for a while.  Pineapples are my favorites, after all.

There now.  Aren't you glad I'm done blathering?


Oops, not done -- someone asked if there were any categories I didn't enter.  Yes.  I didn't enter the ones with the red "x" on them in this list.  I need to get busy if I'm going to enter in every category next year!

Duded Doodads

Certainly not a pair!  I thought to do something asymmetrical with my Doodads from Diane.  My first thought didn't work out so well.  It's lots of little picot-flowers in metallic thread that I had intended to turn into earrings -- so they looked like flowers growing up one side of the earring.  Well, I couldn't keep track of what I was doing (too many picots! -- because the flowers are a bunch of picots on a ring on top of picots on a chain).  When I was done it just looked like a jumble of thread.   Besides that, no way could I make two look alike.







I made a pendant with the other one, but it looks a little skimpy.  It's the motif I was working on in this post, without it's final round -- there wasn't enough thread on my shuttles for that.  I did add the one ring to use to attach it to a jump ring and a chain.

On top of everything else -- I can't get blogger to add the other picture.  I've tried about six (okay so it was really 14 -- who wants to admit to being that dimly persistent?) times and all that shows up is a little square.  If I look close I think it's giving me a raspberrrrrrry!  I'll try adding it again later.  Maybe I can fool it into thinking I'm somebody else.  I think it's mad at me.  

It likes me again!  You'd think I sent it a present or something...


P.S.  A couple of people have asked about the pattern for the swirled, warped, twisted (whatever) square on the second motif.  I don't have a pattern, but I do have a diagram -- however, right now it only has pencil notes on direction and stitch counts.  Since someone is interested if you'll give me a few days, I'll post the pattern -- with and without the third round. -- I've put it away somewhere safe, so I'm still looking.

Nightmare or Dream?

At the suggestion of my family (well, parts of it anyway), this post again has no pictures.  There's no way I know to do a photograph of a dream.   At least, I think it was a dream -- maybe it was a nightmare.  Anyway, I dreamed I tatted a salad.  Yeah, a salad.  A bowl on a plate, which looked like doilies stiffened to a fare-thee-well.  The bowl was filled with chunks of green joined split rings representing lettuce, little bits of yellow lock chain for cheese, round red tomatoes slices with beads for seeds, round orange bits for carrot slices, and little round pearl onions.  I know who to blame for the tomatoes and onions:  Debbie Arnold at DS9Designs.  I guess the rest came from a sick mind, because I am not in the process of making a tatted salad.  Really.  I'm not.  Maybe...

State Fair Entry Day

We took all our "Home Arts" and "Creative Arts" items to enter in the State Fair today.  (Sounds better than saying all our stuff.)  I had a 2.5 hour lunch because it took so long to get them entered.  They write all the tags by hand and some of them write really slowly.  I looked around at the other entries while I was waiting -- okay, not looked around, peered over the barrier of tables to see what might be visible.  I think there are a couple of things I entered I should have just left home.  I dunno 'bout y'all, but my mind gets weird at 3:00 in the morning and thinks things look lots better than they do! 
I entered eleven home arts items, 10 tatted and one crocheted.  There are a few I entered in the State that I didn't enter in the County Fair (those 3:00 in the morning ones, and a couple of others).  I don't have any pictures to show -- that'll have to wait until the 8th when I go to the Fair and see the results.  This is just a little panic blurb...gaaakkkk-- what if they're all really bad?  This is the first year I've entered as Advanced Amature (the next step is professional and I don't make a living on this stuff!).  What's the standard?  Is it that much higher than Amature?  I don't know.  It just seemed silly to not use the Advanced when at least three of the things I entered were my own patterns, ya know?

Again with the Split Chains

Another bit of a doily from all that split chain practice I've been doing.  As you can see -- I've got a center I really like.  This one has some picots all connected together in the center, which makes it appear a bit ...well... off-center.  It's made with two strands of a blue ombre hand-quilting thread wound together on the shuttles.  This one has been done for a while.  I was going to enter it in the State Fair, but it is an inch over the size for a coaster (5 inches) so I had to choose between this one and the purple one.  I think the purple one looks more finished (even though I can't find the light purple to edge it).  The last time I entered something done with an ombre thread the judges said the color made it look fuzzy or out of focus or something. 

Anyway, my aunt admired this when I was working on it.  I told her she could have it when it was done -- after the fair.  Now that it's not going in the fair, I think I will send it off to her.

Hmmmmm...perhaps I should make some pattern notes first, eh?  This is another that did whatever the shuttles thought they could manage, and I didn't write any of it down.  If I send it away, I'll never be able to make another.

Fair's end

The only other things I entered this year were not tatted.  I entered these two crocheted doilies:

Now I have to decide which to enter in the state fair, because they turned out to both be in the same size category and I can only enter one in each category at the state.  Which do you think I should enter?

Fair Again

Two colors of purple Lizbeth size 20 thread and Marie Smith's method of doing split chains resulted in this doily:
The center is the same as a number of others I have sitting around the house -- I did a lot of testing on this split chain thing!  I'd get something I rather liked then start over and somewhere along the line think, "Oh, wait, I could change this bit -- that would be better for this round."  Yes, but once one round changed, all the others after it had to as well.  I didn't write down a pattern either.  *sigh* 


I had intended to make another round (of however wide I could get it without breaking the thread ) in the light purple.  I lost the ball of thread.  I looked everywhere I could think of -- though I will admit I didn't look in the fridge or the toilet tank.  (Maybe I'll check those tonight.)  Anyway, being frustrated by the thread I stopped and blocked it.  Must be okay, because it got a blue ribbon and a high blue (considered for sweepstakes) ribbon.  That made me laugh, because I don't like this doily nearly as well as some others I've made, but it is the one that blocked the best! 

Still Fair

These earrings are my first try at Beanile lace tatting.  I used one of Nina Libin's free patterns.  They're made with Oren Bayan silver metallic thread and forty-bazillion size 11 blue glass seed beads.  I had to change the top a bit to get them to work on my "mommy earwires" (which are not wire, but nylon). 

As you can see, I got a nice second place ribbon for them.  The comment card said "beading should lay flat, so work is too tight"  Yes, I wondered about that.  I seem to have to add a stitch or two here and there to various patterns to get them to lay flat.  That or block the bejabbers out of 'em.  These I didn't block at all, so I think I'll be taking them off the card, blocking, then putting them back on the card for the state fair.  Unless I find a spare few hours to make new and better ones (as if).

They're pretty, though, aren't they?  Just say "Yes!"  :)