This is a first for me - I've never had a blog until today!


I'm taking up the 25 motif challenge as my entry back into the world of tatting after a looong time away! After publishing a book "A Potpourri of Tatted Patterns" back in 1995 thru the late '90's, I pursued other interests until now. Some of you may remember me by one of the patterns in the book-- Heart's Desire at left, which was used by Georgia's online tatting class in the late 90's or early 2000's (?).

Back to the challenge! I am digging out all the designs I was working on back then and will work on the paisley motifs I had started for the book I had planned to do next - "Paisley Pizazz". My challenge motifs will become this book. I have sketches for all kinds of designs to make out of these motifs including, flowers & butterflies of course as well as angels and more.
Here's where I'm starting from:

Heart's Desire Paisley obviously
adapted from my Heart's Desire!


And since I can't seem to get another picture to go into this blog, I'll put the next two paisleys pictures into my next blog.


As well as the 25 motif challenge, I've also planned a few personal challenges
for myself.

1. I am going to reprint my first book. I could never decide if I should just reprint it as is, or redo it first. My originals for this are printed out pages of the text onto which I've glued the finished designs. I take these and place each page individually on the copy machine, then collate, staple and fold them myself. These originals have now gotten battered & are only good for 1 or 2 more reprints and also they were done before I had even heard of a scanner. In fact I had just been exposed to a computer & taught the basics in order to produce the text for the book. So the book is black and white, many of the images are not so good and I thought maybe I should reorganize it to go along with all my teaching lectures, handouts and notes.

Sooo.....what do I do? I attended the lace convention in Denver last year and a couple of tatters who have my book like it and thought I should just get it out the way it is and go on. I'd love any of your thoughts and opinions - what would you do? Should it be redone with color like so many other books?

2. Get a tatting website up and running by the first part of Sept. Probably a bare bones site at first cause waiting until it the way I want it could take forever.

3. I've joined the online tatting class which starts in Sept. and will be contributing a lesson.

4. Way back in the 90's I had also been working on patterns for a "By the Sea" book. Although for a while after I saw that some other designers had done seahorses, I thought maybe I should forget these. But mine are done differently so I'm going to finish them as well as some shell designs!

5. Finish many of the rest of my partially finished designs - cactus, more snowflakes and hearts, and odds and ends of others.

Now, if I can only find all my tatting notebooks with my sketches and project pieces (we just moved last month and there're in a box I haven't found yet) I'll get started. I guess that's enough for now and I'm sure glad the 25 motif challenge is a year long!!!