I *have* been making lace of late -- but I really should have put this response on Chat.
I thought my only purpose in going to the medical center when DH got a bit of skin taken off his nose was to sit in the waiting room in case he needed someone to drive him home. So I loaded up a denim tote bag the size of a brown-paper grocery bag with a sack lunch (no time for breakfast), three books, a pair of partly-knitted socks, and some darning, and I made myself very comfortable. After breakfast, expecting that I wouldn't be summoned until DH was ready to leave, I took out one of my socks, piled the ten pin-backs that had been on the points of the needles on the eating table (there was plenty of room, and nobody else had brought food that needed to be eaten at a table). (The pin backs are a recent acquisition, and I haven't yet worked out a container that can be attached to the sock.) It turned out that when the doctor gave him his final instructions, he wanted me to hear them too. So I hastily crammed the sock into the tote bag without wrapping it in its bandanna or taking the pin backs off the table and, leaving the tote bag by my chair, strode off with the ball of yarn still in my pocket, to the vast amusement of a roomful of people, half of whom had bandages on their noses. Returned to the sack, stuffed in the yarn, and followed DH to an examining room where we were, of course, told that the doctor would arrive in five or ten minutes. But I had TATTING IN MY POCKET: a foot or two of a simple scroll edging that showed every sign of having been made on occasions like these -- or would have shown them if you could have seen it. The center-pull ball had come partly unwound on the outside -- one is *supposed* to put center-pull balls into nets for exactly this reason! -- and maybe half its thread existed in a cloud encompassing the very grabby edging, the shuttle, all the dangling threads from joining in a new shuttle and ball after the scraps I'd begun with ran out, and my teaching shuttle with it's foot-long dangle of variegated #1 thread. This being a coarse, slick thread -- DMC Cordonnette #10 --- the situation was not hopeless. On some previous occasion, the end of the thread had been teased out of the tangle and wound into a ball about half an inch in diameter, and I proceeded to extract more thread and wind it onto the ball. The doctor's assistant asked me whether I was tatting; I told her I would be if I ever got it untangled. She then told me that she had acquired a shuttle and an instruction booklet, and intended someday to learn. I extracted my teaching shuttle from the tangle, but didn't have a chance to show it to her, as all her attention was on DH's nose, and the doctor soon arrived. Sniff! Didn't even have a chance to tell her about Arachne or the many tatting lists. At home later on, I laid the mess on the table, and spread out the skeins that had fallen off the ball, now and again trapping one of them in a zipper snack bag to keep it out of trouble, and got all the thread wound onto one or the other of the balls. Then I worked one repeat to be sure the tatting was ready for action (and to be sure I remembered what I was doing) -- this puts the edging into the category of a WIP -- straightened the edging and wound it on a small square of card, secured the card with a rubber band, put shuttle and edging into another snack bag, put both snack bags into a sandwich bag, and put the sandwich bag into my purse. When I returned to the waiting room to collect my bag, I put the pin backs onto the needle points, but again jammed the knitting into the tote bag sans bandanna, where it still sat this morning when we dashed off before breakfast to drop the cat off at the vet for his orchidectomy. (I usually carry one sock in my purse.) As it happened we arrived five minutes early for our appointment and the door wasn't open yet. I sat down on the porch next to Al and took out my newly-organized tatting while DH went for a walk around the building. But before I'd gotten the thread around my fingers, my attention was distracted by the arrival of a pickup truck that did not obviously contain a dog arriving for the same operation. The puppy appeared, in the driver's arms, when the clinic door opened, but I didn't see where he'd had it. So there -- I've spent a *lot* more time telling you about my lacemaking than I've spent doing it. Unless you want to count the darning. "Point de Venise" darning is interlocked buttonhole stitches such as are sometimes used for needle lace. Al doesn't seem to have noticed his operation, and is much wroth because we won't feed him very much. -- Joy Beeson [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://home.earthlink.net/~joybeeson/ http://home.earthlink.net/~joybeeson/LINKS/KITTEN.HTM west of Fort Wayne, Indiana, U.S.A. where we're getting ready for the fireworks. (The Fourth comes on the third here.) - To unsubscribe send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] containing the line: unsubscribe lace [EMAIL PROTECTED] For help, write to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
