Eye Patches

Another day, another dent in the pile of tatting. I'm actually pretty proud of myself for keeping a nice steady pace on the large order and keeping the same sort of pace on everything else. There was a time when I would have stopped doing everything else to work on the order. I mean no walks with the kids, no dishes or laundry and I would revert to drive by eating habits. Now I take a deep breath, do what I should do during the day and give myself a quota on the tatting tasks to be completed in the day.

Yesterday's goal was to finish the wire covering on the eye patches. I only had a few left to do and they take less time than masks so it was entirely doable...or they did take less time until I discovered that Lizbeth thread likes to twist more when doing this task. What does that mean? Well, it means that my normal method of covering the wire which is a one direction knot I can do fairly quickly wasn't cutting it. As the thread twisted it because tighter and less effective at actually covering the wire basically leaving visible spaces between knots. So I had to change methods and use the more traditional double stitch to cover them which is much slower for me in this application. It also proved more fiddly in many places, but worked much better in covering the wire nicely. I got so used to using the black cebelia with most masks that I didn't realize that the Lizbeth colors were going to behave so differently. Of course I've been surprised by thread behavior before and I probably will some time in the future as well.

So today my quota is to finish one mask, maybe two if it goes quickly. Then I have a necklace and a pendant to remake for the shop. Business has been pretty consistent lately, not terribly busy or full or large sales, but a nice steady trickle and that's a nice feeling really. I certainly hope things continue like this for a while because it's the perfect pace for when school starts up for the kids again in just a couple of weeks. I'm counting down just so it won't sneak up on me or them.