Let me start off today with a little show and tell. Jane of Lamplighter has made yet another truly amazing light shade embellished with medallions she had me custom make for her. Her shades are spectacularly detailed and I am always honored to have a small piece of my work as a part of hers.Yesterday while I was procrastinating instead of tatting masks, I read a post on threadsofatattinggoddess about why we blog and she made a comment about how there were so few tatting tutorials compared to say knitting or crochet ones. I have toyed around with the idea of doing how-to tutorials or videos, but I decided not to bother as they already existed online. I think I forgot that not everyone is a master of the search engine. If it is online I pride myself on my ability to find it. It hardly ever occurs to me that not everyone is as comfortable with searching as I am and just because I can find three different how-to articles doesn't mean that everyone else can.
Anyway, her post made me think that perhaps there were not enough different tutorials to choose from and adding to the pool may not be the waste of time that I initially assumed it would be. Do I think that I can do a better job than the others I've seen? No, not really. I'm not a photographer or videographer or a skilled writer, but I do know how to needle tat and maybe that's enough. I still have one more mask on order that I need to make up, but after that I plan on working on a basic how to needle tat and I will post it either here or more likely on Instructables since the site is pre formatted for such things. I just hope there are enough people curious to learn.
What's a little funny to me about my desire to convert people to the art of tatting is it was the lack of other tatters that brought me to the craft in the first place. I really liked the idea of being able to do something that few others could. I love the fact that people look at tatting like it must be some sort of magic and impossible to replicate. Even more amazing is the looks I receive when people actually watch me tat at full speed. I tell them it's not as hard as it looks and they never believe me. I do honestly want more tatters in the world. I want to see tatting embellishing high end clothing and celebrities wearing tatted jewelry (preferable mine) and I would love to walk into a bookstore and actually find a tatting book in stock. I refuse to believe that this is a dying art and I will do what little I can to keep it alive.
Love the lampshade! Beautiful form and function! Thanks for sharing. It must be very rewarding to see your work all over the place! Of course adding to the pool of tatting instructions would be valuable, indeed!
ReplyDeleteVery elegant lampshade, and your enthusiasm for tatting is wonderful! That is great how your work is being shown and appreciated all over. Definitely a good idea to add to the pool of tatting instructions!
ReplyDeleteI love the lampshade too. This was another point I made in a different post - that it seems Europeans use tatting more for home embellishment than we do here. I'd like to see it more as home decoration - as in MY home. LOL!
ReplyDeleteThere are maybe half a dozen blogs or websites that have tutorials but they have a lot when they do. There are a number of youtube videos but I see too many comments about them not being as user-friendly to a newbie as they should be. Resources are plentiful, but as you say, not everyone knows how to use a search engine or what kind of terms to put in to find what they want. There are some online groups focused on needle tatting but I see very little that the general public can access so I think anything you put on here would be well received.
I'd love to see more of it, too.. and love to learn it.
ReplyDeleteYou do really beautiful work. Tatting looks like a very intimate art!
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