Cheryl's first tatted "heart"

My friend, Cheryl, has been learning to tat and last night I got to teach her how to make chains. She tatted a "chain" of rings and chains and wanted to do something special with it, so she made her husband a card and formed the "chain" into a heart and glued it to the card. She is proud of it, and I am too!!! :) Great job Cheryl!!!! I gave her her first tatting book today. It's Easy Tatting by Rozella Linden. I showed her several projects that I feel she could tat without too many problems, and I can't wait to see what she does!! :)

So excited!!! My newest tatting student is doing really well!!!

My friend, Cheryl, found out that I am a tatter and told me that she had some things she got somewhere and she didn't know what they were or how to use them. She had tried to learn somehow and wasn't able to succeed. Well, I told her I would be glad to show her what I have learned and we started lessons. We started with rings. She tried to practice, but was having trouble getting more than 2 stitches to come out well. She had a "light-bulb" moment one night just before falling asleep and then tried it in the morning and called me all excited!!! She had made several rings. Well, today she came for a cookout and insanity(that's what it is when our group get together), and while they played UNO on one end of the table, we tatted at the other end. She showed me her rings so please to have gotten it. They were rings, but all crazy-like. Bad tension, very loose stitches, bumpy and crazy looking, but they were rings! Well, I told her to just work on trying to get her stitches next to each other and smooth looking. So after about 10 minutes they looked much better and we moved on to making picots with a picot gage. She mastered that very quickly!!! And she made several rings 5p5p5p5. I was so proud of her and she very extremely proud!!! Then we went on to joining those rings with the new picots. Here is her end effort and she can't stop smiling and showing everyone her progress!!! It's a drastic difference from what she came with. Yay Cheryl!!!! I will introduce her to the blogs next month.

And....she and I are concocting an idea using tatting so I will do my best to keep you posted on that. :)

Have a new tatter coming up here......

My niece, Bethany, has come to stay for a few days and during one of her "I'm bored" moments, she saw me tatting and wanted to learn. At first I was sure this wound up-due to be 14 yrs. old next week(she made me tell you all)- child would not be still enough or actually work on learning, but she proved me wayyyyyyy wrong. Hardest part is that she is left handed and had troubles with me teaching her right handed, so I changed it up and taught her left handed(thank God He has helped me well with that and she is learning). She has learned the double stitch(and for some odd reason named the stitch "Bob"-don't bother asking I have no reasoning with this strange child). Here she is with my shuttle and white thread size 10(emptying one for me).

Learning the stitch and trying to work on a ring.

Doing ok.

Got a few stitches done and had to show them off.(She loves attention and if she keeps tatting-BEWARE- cuz' she wants to have her own blog and join us-----we have some time before that happens yet.) :)

Showing off the first ring with major excitement(too bad I had the flash on-at least we can see the ring).

Working on the "flip" here.

She worked for a couple hours last night and ended the night in 2 games of "SORRY". And was wanting to stay up and play more cuz' she didn't win. She says she has to WIN! :D

We had to get up to go shopping this morning, but the first thing Bethany wanted to do....TAT. We had to make her wait till after getting groceries. And here you can see she got it together by herself and has been working at getting the stitch down correctly.

And, she is excited to show you that today she is working with variegated pastel colors!

Doing stitches on her own, and doing pretty well. She has very little patience or attention and is loving tatting(miracle????). :)

And I was trying to make myself a tatted hair scrunchie and here it is so far. The pattern is from Helping Hands Newsletter from Handy Hands Vol.12 Issue 2 Spring/Summer 2004. It's called Curved Hankie Edging and the thread is Lady Shuttlemaker's HDT Tulips size 20. And it goes great with my red shirt!