A Lost Art

So awhile back I made some ridiculous goals with the intent of keeping myself forever moving forward. One of those unreachable goals was to make tatting the next big crafting craze. Then something weird happened, I thought I might actually give it a go, well not exactly that, but a modified version. I what to expose tatting to a wider audience so that it is no longer referred to as a lost art. How, you ask. Well, I'm still working out all the details and I'm gonna need a little help from as many people as I can get.

I submit to you, Tatting is not a lost art: the challenge. I've done a beading challenge a few times and I thought, why not do something like that to get more people to not only see tatting, but use it in their own pieces. What I was thinking of doing is offering a tatted medallion in one or two colors at maybe $5 or $6 to anyone that wants to participate. The challenge would be to use that medallion in your own work, be it jewelry, multimedia art, clothing, whatever. Then you would list the creation for sale on etsy using something like TotusMelchallenge as a tag or upload it to a flickr group I would create if you aren't a seller or simply don't want to sell the piece. All of this would be done within a set time limit. I would recruit a small panel of judges and the winner(s) would receive something from my shop or another prize to be determined.

My ultimate goal here, is to get tatting a lot of exposure and hopefully by association get myself a little exposure even if it means eventually there will be more tatters to compete with. What I need from all of you out there is input. I need to know if you think this is a good idea. Would you participate? How good would the prize have to be to get you to play? Should I offer the medallion in just one color(ecru) or perhaps two (ecru & black)? How long should the time limit be? I'm thinking that I need a least a dozen people to make this worth the effort, so I'm going on a forum recruiting spree soon. If you'd like to be kept in the loop, just shoot me an email using the Contact Totusmel link on the bottom of the right column or convo me on etsy.