Teaching

Well, what an interesting day I had. You might think that as a homeschooling parent, summer would pose no additional challenge for me. This of course, is not true. After months of having a morning prepared for me, I am dangling over the edge with two increasingly bored children. So we've taken up yoga and tai chi in the mornings and they asked me to teach them to tat. That last thing I attempted yesterday.

The oldest child took to it just fine, after a few false starts, but the youngest ended up in a ball of frustration. So I tried a couple of different crafts with her until something made her happy. She landed on loom knitting. I think that the movements of tatting were just too complex for her to get right away and like me, if she isn't immediately good at something she's likely to give up on it forever. I figured shifting gears quickly lets her come back to it when she's ready.

So as you can imagine with all this teaching and some cleaning, it took me some time to get back to the tatted chain earrings. I did get four pairs photographed and listed and I managed to get one more pair in blues made. I still have some threads set aside for a brown version, so I'll make that up today. I also sold one pair! Yes, I'm excited about that. It means I have a purple pair to remake as well and even better, they were sold with a necklace, so I have that in queue to remake as well. Of course I'll have to fit that around the girls crafting and more cleaning, but it's great that they've got something else to do with their summer.

Instructables At The Maker Faire

Well, I'm a bit more rested today, but absolutely not recovered. There are still at least a dozen things that I need to do in the next week before I leave again for a whole week this time. I think that I might be getting a bit ahead of myself though...I shall endeavor to calm down a bit. I have so many stories that I could tell from the Maker Faire. The people that were met, the sites that were seen even from our tiny corner not to mention the things that were learned about physically selling my pieces, but I don't want to bore you with a week of anecdotes. I might still do so though, so be warned.

The first thing I wanted to share was a bit unexpected though in hindsight I should have known it would happen. I haven't vended at a lot of events, but I've been to my fair share. Thing I don't like a bout the craft fair environment are customers who treat it like a flea market, fairs that allow flea market type vendors to sell as well as the whole why pay that much when I could make it myself, when they most surely could not. This was not one of those fairs. This was the Maker Faire, almost everyone who walked through the gates makes something or has a real respect for those who do. There was no price haggling, and when someone wondered if they could do that themselves, it was out of genuine desire to learn something new, not to avoid paying our prices.

This turned out to be the perfect environment to advertise not my wares so much as my lessons on Instructables. I received visits from at least three members of the Instructables team throughout the day, first from Christy, the community and marketing manager that left cards for me to give folks directing them to my lessons. I even met the CEO Eric later in the day and he thanked me for sharing. There's nothing quite as surreal as meeting people who recognize you from the Internet especially when they are the geek elite. I spent much of the day directing people to the site, ensuring them that they can and should learn to tat as they often said they always meant to. I sent older ladies, young girls, the crafting hipsters and even a few man folk in the right direction. I demonstrated the technique and explained how easy it was to learn and my ridiculous goal of making tatting the next big crafting craze moved just one step closer to fruition. I should have expected that level of desire to learn from this crowd, but I was awed by it.

That was just one of the amazing things I took away from the fair and there of course are more pieces to the weekend. I hope to hear from many of those I talked to and I hope hey all give tatting a go. Sure that's more competition for my wares, but I still think it would be incredible to be even a little responsible for the emergence of this art into the mainstream, so yay for the Maker Faire.

You Will All Be Tatting One Day

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.