100 years ago today...

Two sterling silver tatting shuttles were gifted on Christmas day, 1918:

The last initial is the same on both shuttles, which leads me to believe that these were given to two sisters. I wish I knew the story behind them. I purchased these on eBay in 2012, the year that I learned how to tat.

The first one reads "FEC 12-25-'18"

The second shuttle reads "M.W.C. 12-25-'18"

I thought these would be interesting to post today. Merry Christmas everyone!

Blocking Snowflakes

I'm almost done making snowflakes for the year. These have been blocked and stiffened with Mod Podge Extreme Glitter. They are not attached to each other, just laid out on the table to form one giant snowflake:

I've been using a polar grid that I printed out from Inkscape to block the latest snowflakes. I placed each grid into a plastic sheet protector, to protect the tatting from the ink on the paper (and also to prevent the stiffener from sticking to the blocking surface).

I haven't been pinning the tatting because I don't know how that would work with a sheet protector, and I also don't want the pins to get stuck to the Mod Podge stiffener. The stiffener makes it so that I can push the tatting into place by hand and it will stay.

If you'd like a copy of the snowflake blocking template, you can access and print it HERE. I've also put a link to the template at the top of my Tutorials page.

I made a few of these snowflakes in smaller thread to see how big they would be. Here's a comparison with measurements listed under each snowflake:

It was pretty difficult to get the Josephine knots to close using size 80, so I won't be making any more in this thread. Size 20 works the best, and size 40 is alright too.