Covid finally caught us...and taught me a new craft!

We put up all the fortification we could and took all evasive action as dictated by health officials and common sense, alas, only to have the virus invade our family after two and a half years of pursuit. Starting with DH, we fell ill one by one at the end of July. The kids bounced back to normal routine after a week. Us elders however, found it very hard to make a quick comeback. 

One week after the virus attack, I couldn't read, I couldn't work on the computer, I couldn't do any housework or gardening. My hands simply itched for something to do, something new, something not strenuous. "Learn tatting!" burst into my mind. What, that old thing? Starting in 2004, how many times had I tried to teach myself the same thing? After failing to learn to tat with shuttles, I put them away and got tatting needles. It was so easy to tat on needles, but all the patterns were for tatting with shuttles. Another dead end.

Not one to ignore my intuition, though, I dragged myself up the stairs to my craft room and searched high and low for the shuttles. I searched all the cupboards and shelves. Na-ah. Before giving up, I opened an old carry-on case in which some odds and ends were stashed, and there they were! They were safely put away in a pouch carefully labelled "tatting shuttles" on the outside. 

Now what? I dragged out the tome I had started out with...

I found the rudimentary instructions in the Lacework section and wound the shuttle thread around my fingers and started... only to give up once again because the "flipping" was not working. That's when my intuition shouted, "Check YouTube, you..." (My intuition is usually a well-mannered entity. But sometimes I try her patience.)

So I went to YouTube. I checked out 5 beginners' videos and learned several things from all of them... One showed me the most efficient way to hold and move the shuttle, one showed me exactly how to slack the left hand for the 'flip' to occur smoothly, one showed me the whole process in close up... I bowed to all those teachers in my mind and started tatting. The end results of three and a half weeks of tatting almost half an hour on weekdays looks thus...

Yes, that is most of the "work" that I have created in the past month. As I was in the process of mastering the all-important flip and creating the muscle memory to keep it smooth, it resulted in plenty of mishaps. For example, the one below shows one perfectly executed ring. When I started the other, the fifth stitch refused to flip and I had to stop because of the tight knot.

Then I started making rings and connecting picots, but sometimes got the counting all wrong resulting rings of various sizes...

Then I noticed that sometimes I would get the picot connecting wrong - not collecting the proper thread through the loop or pulling the thread in backwards, resulting in more knots...

Then I managed a string of rings, attached with loops of varying and untidy lengths. I then tried my hand at tatting with size 40 thread, resulting in the teeny little blue ring that you see in the picture below. I found that I would need magnifying glasses to make those. So I desisted, mercilessly unwinding all that thread from the shuttle and throwing it away. Seriously, what had I been thinking when I bought size 40 thread, with my high-myopic eyes? Nope, nothing but no. 10 thread for me!

Then I went back to the RD Book of Needlework and tried out a tiny pattern that required me to reverse my work after each ring and connect the rings in a double row. By this time, I had learned to keep tugging at my shuttle thread to see if was gliding smoothly and caught mistakes long before they spoiled my whole ring. By taking off my specs and squinting at the offending stitches, I also learned to unpick them, correct my mistake, and go on my merry way.

Last week, I tried a shuttle and ball affair, changing between shuttle thread and ball thread and learning to keep them separate. I winged the pattern and created the motif below. I first made the outer circle and then went mad and created a hodgepodge in the inner circle. Just for fun...

But yesterday, I created a motif with two shuttles, again on my own, again unpicking several knots along the way... completely imperfect, but beautiful still...

The picots are not equal-sized. I've created quite a few unintentional tiny picots along the chains, but it is still a recognizable tatted motif. As I've moved along, I've learned to not look at the piece, but my counting needs to improve. It is so easy to transport as well. So now a couple of shuttles, thread, and a small pair of blunt scissors travel in a Ziploc bag with me wherever I go. 

I've just learned the basics and there are a lot of things that I have to learn before I can use tatting in projects. But it is a start. And it is so heartening to finally have got through the difficulty of mastering the "flip". Now looking forward to creating things from these patiently waiting books in my collection...

Meanwhile, I have gained enough energy to get the housework done and have started taking care of the garden for half an hour every day. Small bursts of work are okay. But I tried cooking for 4 hours straight last Saturday for DH's birthday, and couldn't move at all on Sunday. But that is how it rolls.