Learning to Tat!

Learning To Tat!

I always admired the hand tatted doilies that my great great aunt made. I also thought of the art as something my "old relatives" did. I met a women last year at a reinactment costume meeting who was tatting beautiful drawstring handbags. I decided that I was going to learn to tat. In the spirit of DIY (Do-It-Yourself), I bought myself a plastic Boye© shuttle and thread (Ughhh...don't use tatting size 80 thread - use a larger gage thread like a cotton size 10 crochet thread). I then found a book at the library and began teaching myself yesterday. Well... the books at the library were difficult to understand but I did figure out the double stich. Today, I realized that I had a problem. I was not getting my stitch onto the shuttle thread. I found This'n'Tat where it was finally very clear what was wrong with my method. I was not accomplishing the "flip" ("pop"). Now I can spend my time trying to get the flip or "pop" into my motion. Cudos again to the Web!

Book Love

Here is a great article from the Washington Post about book lovers and book storage. I find this quote from a professional organizer interesting:

"Books that you keep are childhood books, historical books, classics. There are two options with the other books: If it's so good that you would tell friends to read it, you pass it along. If it's so awful, you donate it."

Now... I need to remember that next time I cull through my books.