Progress on Trumble Starfish

Tea Time with Tatting

While my husband and I listened to a live YouTube broadcast this evening of a class on Exodus I was not up to attending in person, I settled in ready to make some progress on Lisa Trumble's Starfish. I managed to finish the fourth arm. I know it isn't much, but I've been obsessed with updating Element-al Approach to Tatting Design and it's accompaniment which provides links to tutorials and patterns using the techniques mentioned in the initial document. Personal tatting time has been supplanted by computer time for over two weeks.

Most of the links were broken. Research and the Wayback Machine permitted me to update or replace them. I'm now doing a comparison of the two parts to make sure I haven't missed anything before I post the updates. Google Drive is being very uncooperative in letting me update the current links to show you the updates, so I may have to post the updated links separately. If that's the case, I will leave the old links up as well--at least for a while. Watch for an alert here, and in the Facebook groups to which I belong, that new links are up if you want to replace your old copies. 

With my daughter Sarah's permission, I've also been working on a new sharing her first bookmark design created in late 1996 and published in the March 1997 issue of  KNOTS!  (She was 11 and had not been tatting long.) Since it uses the three elements I talk about in Element-al Approach to Tatting--rings (circles), chains (arches), and bare thread (straight lines), I think it would be fun to tat it up as a sampler of different elements that can replace those basic elements. My completed bookmark will look quite funny, I think, but fun to use and useful to me as a reminder of the fun of using this approach to design. I'm not trying to create a new pattern design, just planning to enjoy playing with substitution. When I finish preparing the updated pattern page, perhaps some of you would enjoy playing with the elements as well.

Susan Fuller and her tatting design classes were my inspiration to prepare Element-al for my own use back in 2015 and 2016. It has been so encouraging to me to discover that some of you have found these tools helpful as well. Updates soon.

Happy tatting.