TotusMel

Well my mind is all over the place this morning. I was reading a blog post by a steamteam friend about the Edwardian Ball early and besides making me horribly jealous, it got me feeling a little nostalgic. There were a lot of things I used to want to do and places I thought I might go. I know there is still plenty of time for many amazing adventures, but this short backward glance sent my brain in yet another direction. I realized that I sit here and mouth off nearly every day and I never seem to share all that much about who I am outside of craft. Sure, you know I'm a tattooed needle tatter that makes stuff to sell on etsy and you probably figured out that I'm married with a couple of kids, but aside from that personal revelations are few and far between. I'm not saying that I should start spouting out my address, phone number and social security number, but I thought it would be neat if once a week I offer up a fact or secret until I run of interesting things to share or get bored. So I thought I would start things off with...

What the holy hell is TotusMel?

Over a decade ago I got online and was faced with the challenge of created my first screen name. At first I was happy to try out something simple like Dragongirl, but it soon became clear that all the simple names were taken and if I wanted one of those I would have to add some ridiculous number sequence after it. I decided to change tactics. It is worth noting that I was straight out of college at this point and was feeling fairly pretentious. I had just finished reading Ulysses by Jame Joyce with the help of not one or two, but three dictionaries and thought I would look terribly intelligent if my screen name was in Latin.

It couldn't be just any Latin though, it needed to not only have meaning, but be a phrase no one else would ever pick. For this I started with my name, Pamela. Though the name was apparently coined by an author, I had read that the names meaning is "all honey". The word for honey is Mel and the word for all is Totus. I combined the two into what is probably a horrible grammatical error into TotusMel. I imagine that no one will ever try to use my screen name and I have yet to have a need to change it. It has simple become who I am online, my other name.

I am still working on my cluster effect masks and I predict that as soon as I finish and start on another project the cluster will rear its head again leaving me in a creative rut. I will try to keep up this personal exposure once a week, I hope it makes for an interesting read in the absence of new tatting to share.