Thanksgiving

We ended up getting a huge snowstorm that has caused lots of grief on lots of levels.  We ended up getting  at least 24 inches in less than 2 days. It is super heavy snow so trying to get unburied has been an ordeal.  On top of that we have gotten rain and then freezing at night so everything is like an ice skating rink in places where the snow has been cleaned off.  Thankfully the only real damage we have suffered so far has been extremely sore back and legs and the snow pulled off several gutters and flashing off the house but so far we have survived.

The next holiday I need to get caught up on is Thanksgiving.  I had an idea of beading a turkey body and using a piece of tatting for the “feather part”.  Due to the short amount of time between  the next couple of holidays I needed to hurry to get on the project.  My brain power is pretty much just being taken up with dealing with the problems at work and the everyday task of just trying to survive so I didn’t have time to try to invent a pattern or pour over the internet looking for one .  I was going through past projects and found, by happy mistake, that I could repurpose one of Mark Meyers , aka Tatman, patterns to work with the concept I was going for. I used this same pattern for my Thanksgiving 2016 cards, it's called back to school apple. I had my bobbin wound with left over thread from last years thanksgiving project  so I just used that thread which is Lizbeth called falling leaves in  size 10.

 I ended up making 16 of these but only ended up sending 9 of them out.  I have been so late in getting these out lately that I am embarrassed so I end up not even sending them out at all so I end up with extra motifs and have no idea what to do with them.

The card idea was my husbands this time,  I always come up with the picture and I have recruited him to help with the sayings.

Halloween

I was going to try to take advantage of our snow day off and get another post out of the way. I started several posts but I didn't get them finished on the snow day but at least I made the attempt.   It snowed on Sunday night through till Monday morning and as I work for a service company that runs service trucks and live in an area that is not equipped for snow removal my boss made the decision to not even open the doors. We actually got about 6 inches on Monday and we stayed down in the teens all week so the snow didn’t get much of a chance to melt so when we had an anticipated storm set to hit the area again on Friday my boss decided to not open on Friday either. We did end up getting about 4 more inches which is huge when we don’t have snow plows or sand trucks so it was probably a good idea that we didn’t have the guys come in and take the chance of getting stuck and being snowed out of home.

Anyway, up next we have Halloween. Since there are several months between 4^th of July and Halloween you would think that I would have plenty of time to come up with a fun motif and have plenty of time to get them done but apparently, in my world that is just not the case. I remembered seeing a spider web motif somewhere in my cyber surfing but it was a bit difficult to find it again. I remembered that it was probably “tatman” site that I saw it on but since he has taken the site down it was quite difficult to try to find. For some reason I had it in my mind that that was the next pattern I wanted so I searched for a long time trying to find the pattern. I did end up finding a picture of it and it took me several tries to figure out the pattern.

  I am terrible at figuring out what I need to change about the counts in order for my project to lay flat. It took me several motifs before I remembered that you can climb out of a row with a split ring so that the web ended correctly.  My end product doesn’t look anywhere near as good as Mark Meyers (tatman) but I think the little beaded spider kind of redeems the project. 

I made 12 complete cards (not including the mess ups in the picture above). These are probably one of my least favorite projects I have ever done but at least I got most of them sent out.  The card idea was mine, my husband didn’t get the concept but I sent them out anyway.

No Easter just 4th of July

Calendar wise up next I should have Easter to post about.  I spent several hours digging through my tatting boxes and photos trying to find my Easter project. I finally had to come to the conclusion that I didn’t make or send any out. It is quite frightening that I seriously can’t remember why or what happened but the fact remains that I was lame and missed a holiday. I did find a couple motifs that I started that may have been a start of Easter but I can’t post them because they will eventually go out to family.

So I guess up next we have Independence Day.  It looks like I made 15 of these but I only sent out 9 of them. I feel like this year has been a terrible year where I started with the best of intentions but never followed through or finished any of my projects.  It seems like I made lots of motifs but then didn’t get them sent out. 

I tried to find where I got the pattern for the tatted motif from but I can’t seem to find it.  It makes me feel real badly when I can’t give credit to the artist that created a pattern that I used. I am fairly certain that I found the pattern on pintrest and the pattern had a picture of the final project with the pattern behind it. I used artiste thread in size #10 and the color is blueberry. I remember I had a big problem with this pattern with missed joins and I ended up ripping a bunch of stitches out which was not pleasant because trying to open a closed ring that doesn’t have a picot in it is not very easy. I didn’t love the way this pattern turned out but I couldn’t find another pattern and I was in a hurry to try to get them done.  

As for the pattern for the little beaded doodad , I have had most of my patterns so long that I can’t remember where I got them from. I have been beading for over 25 years and I have a huge accumulation of holiday ornaments that I hang on a display for each holiday and more often than not that is where I get my ideas for the tatted accents. 

Now the card however is solely my husband’s idea! It is kind of an inside family joke. My family has plenty of firework stories gone wrong and this was just his little idea of a reminder of those cautionary tales.