Scrounging for some tatting…

Tomorrow I’ll be spending the day demoing tatting at the Piecemaker’s Peddler’s Market in Costa Mesa.  I’m going to start teaching there in August and they use their Peddler’s Market also as a way to advertise all the different classes they have going on there.  They used to have a needle tatter teach there, but she lives a very long way away so was looking for someone to take over as the tatting teacher there.  We met back in March and she put me in touch with them so I’m now the official tatting teacher there.  (Assuming they like my classes this quarter and let me stick around!)

I’m looking forward to meeting some of the their teachers tomorrow and seeing what classes I might end up taking.  I generally to stick with tatting, because everytime I think about learning something new (at some point I’d like to learn knitting and weaving) I remember all the tatting projects I want to do.  I also remember how little space and time I have for anything new and that usually keeps me from starting new crafts.  Heh.  I have no space or time for anything new.  All 4 dimensions are filled.

That being said, Piecemakers has a lot of interesting classes.  Sure, they’ve got the usual knitting, quilting and crocheting but after those three tatting is actually one of the more well-known techniques that they have classes for.  They also seem to have a very strong marketing department and a strong following in the community so I’m hoping my classes fill up and I’m really looking forward to teaching there.  I’m going to teach two different beginning tatting classes (different, so that you can take both of them and still get a lot of new stuff from the second one) in August and then an intermediate class in September.  Class proposals are due early next week so I need to finally settle on what I’m going to teach for each.

The title for this post comes from the fact that most of my “good” pieces of tatting are kept in a train case that I left in my car up in Seattle.  (Last week I few back from Seattle to San Diego and in another week and a half I’m going to take the train up to Seattle, pick up my car again and then I have about 4 weeks to spend time there and Vancouver Island and then make my way back to LA.)  I forgot about tomorrow’s demo when I was quickly packing up stuff for this trip back south.  Mostly I took stuff that I wasn’t going to need for the rest of my time traveling the Northwest.  Wanted to bring it back to make a little more space in my car.  SO all my fingerless gloves, bookmarks and hair pieces are sitting in my car in Seattle and I won’t be able to have them out for tomorrow’s demo.  Luckily I did bring down all the pieces I have finished for my shawl so far (I really need to do an update on that project.  I think it’s about half done now).

After my first initial panic when I realized I hadn’t brought much down I remembered that I’ve been tatting for 10 years now so there’s tons of stuff here at my parent’s house, including a small coffee tablecloth.  Only a single fingerless glove though, from a pair that I haven’t finished making, so I’ll have to stick with pictures for those.  Other than the gloves and flower barrettes, the only thing I’m disappointed I don’t have is all my books, though I don’t have a very large library.  Everything fits in a single over-the-shoulder bag which I took up to Seattle with me.  I would have liked to have had books out for people to flip through.  I do have a snowflake book which I think will be popular and of course, I have the Priscilla books so between the two that should be enough to give people a start of an idea about what sorts of things they can make.

Anyway, I should go dig around in the back of drawers and see what sort of tatting I can find.  I’ll take pictures tomorrow of what I manage to come up with.  It’s going to be a pretty random collection of old projects that I haven’t looked at in years so it might end up inspiring some new ones.