I have had the pleasure of tatting with Karey Solomon's hand-painted threads recently.  When you see all her threads in one spot, the job of picking out only a few is difficult because each one is soooo beautiful and unique.  The colors change very fast (very different from LizBeth variegateds) and thus one regular-sized ring can have up to 5 colors in it. The first photo is what I call 'Seaweed' color as Karey custom dyed it for a project in which I am creating tatted seaweed for my new book titled "Sea Things in Split Ring Tatting".  The only thing that makes tat ..read more

After going on the first ever Tat Sea 2022 Tatting Cruise, I (and I think everyone else) was inspired by one of the cruise-goer's beautiful tatted/beaded necklaces and earrings.  I will have to profess that I hate working with beads (especially on my shuttle thread) but now really want some tatted, glizty jewelry.   I think this thread is the one for me.  It tats up quite well.  You have to be a bit careful when making joins that you grab all of the thread and not just a portion to bring up through the picot join as it easily splits.  But even though I tat qui ..read more

  I found these 'Magic Pins' in a quilt shop here in my new hometown of Grand Junction, Colorado.  I am very hopeful that they will help prevent the hurts my right hand, middle finger gets when pushing in regular pins to a cardboard base to block my tatting.  Last time I blocked about a dozen pieces and my finger hurt for over a week. My husband forbade me showing off my owwie to everyone ..read more

 After the two-week long motorcycle trip to LA I worked on the house and yard in Council Bluffs, Iowa, getting ready for 80th birthday party for Jerry's mom, Ruth.  Late in July we went to our vacation home in Grand Junction, CO to see IF we could fix it and possibly move there permanently.  Turns out it was too costly to repair so on a whim we went house-hunting and found a house we liked.  Thus this purchase pushed up our move date.  We went home and the rest of the year (August through November) was spent getting rid of stuff at our IA house (we were moving into a h ..read more

I think that I have been posting some things to my FB The ShuttleSmith Tatting page but just realized that I have completely ignored this my main website since my retirement in June of 2021. In a nutshell: First 2 weeks of June my husband I took a two-week long motorcycle trip from NE/IA where we live, down the Mississippi River Valley, way south to Houma, Louisiana (about 20 miles from the Gulf of Mexico).  We chose to go to Houma instead of New Orleans because we wanted to see 'real' LA and Houma is supposed to be the heart of Cajun and Bayou country.  It did not disappoint!  ..read more

 As of June 1st I am officially retired from my career as an Electron Microscopy Technologist (with side jobs as an Neuropathology Technologist). I started my career at Creighton University (Omaha, NE) and was there for 27 years until it was obvious that my job wouldn’t be viable for much longer. So I ‘jumped ship’ to Nebraska Medicine/Univ. of Nebraska Medical Center where I worked for almost 12 years. My wonderful husband suggested that I retire early. I was planning on retiring at the end of the year, but Jerry encouraged me to bump up the date. So for 2+ months I was feverishly traini ..read more

  This is my darling sister-in-law, Carol, who is sporting a sweater with tatting elements in it ..read more

 A recent study has indicated that threads give off certain pheromones that hypnotize women (and some men) and cause them to purchase ungodly amounts of thread. When stored in large quantities in enclosed spaces (ie. stores), the pheromones in the thread causes memory loss and induce 'gathering syndrome' (similar to the one's in squirrels before the onset of winter). Sound tests have also revealed that these threads emit a very high-pitched sound heard by only a select few (known as 'tatters'). When played backward these sounds are heard as chants: '...BUY ME! TAT ME!....' Furthermore, th ..read more

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