Friday, February 15, 2013

Not Quite Spring

It was definitely an interesting day yesterday. The kids are suppose to have school today, but since the husband has the day off, I did extra classes yesterday so they could play hooky today as well. This meant the morning was even longer than usual and they were in a bit of a whiny mood to boot. Then the day took a strange turn. We went out to lunch after which we hung out outside with the husband before he had to go back to work. I suppose the relatively warm weather got me thinking of Spring because when we got home I kept thinking of yard work.

First I decided that I needed to tat a little though and I didn't want to work in white. I tried to get creative, but I think I was too distracted to really focus so instead I decided to see if I could figure out the lattice technique seen in some of the older tatting pattern books. I'm still not sure I figured it out though since there is some language in the pattern that makes no sense to me at all, 'make a loop by crossing the first stitch'...what? why? No idea, so I just did it up my own way and it looks like it's suppose to though I don't really like how nonuniform the zig-zag chains look. It killed some time anyway and I might be able to bend the technique to my will.

After this semi-successful experiment I went outside to pull the weeds I've pretended weren't growing in the back yard all winter. Some of them were the size of a cat. Unfortunately we had a lot of rain very short amount of time and our native soil is clay, so part of our backyard is still supersaturated with water. That's a nice way of saying it's like a swamp out there, a muddy, soggy swamp. This made the task much more annoying and I didn't even finish. Even so my hands and legs are sore today and I'll probably go out and torture myself again today. Hopefully I'll get some creative tatting done as well. We've got a long weekend ahead of us and I don't want to waste all of it.

1 comment:

Marilee Rockley said...

Looks like you've figured it out beautifully!

It's been awhile since I did any lattice work, but I think when the chains cross they use what modern tatters call an "alligator join". Just put the core thread on one side of the chain, the ball thread on the other, and tat the next stitch. The chain gets squeezed in between the double stitches "like the jaws of an alligator".