Valentine Cards

I love making Valentine's Day cards, especially when I can combine craft techniques.This year's card uses paper and crocheted hearts. I volunteer once a week at the Ten Thousand Villages store in Raleigh, NC. We are selling a garland of hearts this month from Bangladesh which caught my attention. What if I took the hearts apart and glued them onto card stock? The paper hearts have been hand printed with a lacy design in silver ink, but I wanted to add another made-by-me handmade part to the piece. How about a thread crochet heart?

Since I am making a couple dozen cards, I wanted a heart pattern that would work up quickly. I chose blogger Lola Girl's "Mini Crochet Heart," which worked up in literally minutes. I used size 10 crochet thread and a size 4 steel crochet hook. I attached the heart to the card by threading the tails through the holes already on the paper hearts. That accomplished two benefits: (1) receivers could remove the crocheted heart and use it on something else or hang it as an ornament, and (2) no tails from me to sew in to finish off the piece!

Off the Shuttle: Tatted Hatband for Hat

First project of 2015 started and finished!

I recently bought a black wool hat for winter wear. It's from a company that sells hats for UV protection; this one is supposed to provide 80% UV protection. This is great, but it's a rather undistinguished addition to my winter wardrobe. I had so many compliments on the tatted hatband I made for my summer hat that I decided to make a hatband for this hat as well.

The band is a combination of two patterns. The band part is pattern "No. 1" from "Edgings for All Occasions" in Tatting Doilies & Edgings, edited by Rita Weiss (Dover Publications, Inc., 1980, pg. 23). The pattern for the flower embellishment is "Carnation Boutonniere" from New Things Happen to Tatting, Book 159 (The Spool Cotton Company, 1941). It's been reprinted in The Tatter's Treasure Chest, edited by Mary Carolyn Waldrep (Dover Publications, Inc., 1990, pg. 39).

A better name for this piece might be "Recursion Flower" because each chain has 5 picots with a ring and chain attached to picots 1, 3, and 5 in each succeeding round. The pattern calls for 3 rounds; I thought about adding a fourth round, but feared I'd run out of thread with the dramatic increase in rings and chains that another round would entail. All this increasing causes the rows to bunch up and ripple creating the carnation blossom effect. As tedious as the pattern can be with those seemingly-endless repeats, the end result is worth it...this is the third time I've made this pattern.

The thread is Lizbeth size 20 in color #605 Silver. I sewed the pieces onto the hat with invisible nylon thread.

Year 2014 Projects

Here, in no particular order, are photos of 52 fiber projects I finished in 2014. This is 20+ more than last year and an unexpected meeting of my goal of averaging one project per week. I've already got 3 projects in progress this month so maybe I'll do even better this year.