On to other things & Cro-tatting

The contest still didn't turn out as well as I had hoped for - I only had one entrant & hundreds of spam messages. Phooey! I'm thinking that I'd be better off doing a contest in winter, when people are cocooning at home & more likely to be checking out other blogs that they don't normally go to.

I've also realized that I'm a terrible blogger - I've had this blog for nearly a year, and I've only made 22 posts - including this one. My friend Kelly, at Crazy Dog Farm , has only been blogging for 3 weeks & has already made 17 posts. I have post envy!

So it's time to get on with it and start making some posts!

Recently I've picked up cro-tatting again. In case you've never heard of it before, cro-tatting is a way of making lace that looks like tatting, but using a special elongated crochet hook instead. A really good site to learn the basics of cro-tatting from is MaryM's. Besides having a great tutorial here, she also has a lot of sweet & wonderful original cro-tat patterns. The clincher is though, that it is very difficult to find other cro-tatting patterns. Annie's Attic no longer carries cro-tatting books, and they were really the ones to set the trend. Of course, you can still find some pattern booklets available on Ebay, but if you're like me, you can never have too many patterns, so what to do, what to do?

With a little bit of experimenting , you'll find that you can convert most shuttle tatting patterns to cro-tatting - it just takes a little bit of a work around. Where in shuttle tatting you can just make a tatted chain, with cro-tat you will have to make some chain stitches & then go back over the chain with enough single crochets to match the amount in the pattern. At times this may require that you make your rings first, then do a second row/round to make your cro-tat chains.

This week, I'll be working on some patterns from an Annie's Attic book called Charming Boudoir, My first project is going to be the towel edging, which I'm going to do in a dark pink. I'm thinking that I'm going to sew it on as an edging onto an upcycled denim tote that I'm going to be making. My scanner has been giving me grief again, so I'll have to ask my daughter, Deborah, if she'll take some pics when it is done. If the summer weather stays as cruddy as it has been, that should be tomorrow!