County Fair Doily

Round five is complete and round six is in progress. The square doily is past the half-way point & now measures 11 cm. (4.3 inches) from corner to corner.

Rows 5 and 6 of Purple and Teal Square Doily
Debbie Arnold © 2002
It is tatted in size 40 Lizbeth Linen (color #693) and size 50 Treebeard HDT from LadyShuttleMaker.

I stopped halfway through round six to show you how the scallop from round four turns into a square.

Sw4nkyL4c3r is right, though. I obsess over trivial things when it comes to lace. I am still distracted by the difference in thread sizes. Nobody else seems to notice!

As I tat, the refrain from this Queen song is buzzing in the back of my brain.



Under pressure! It must be from all the obsessing.  ツ

Bali Fever
In spite of the need to focus on the square doily for the fair, Bali fever continues. It's all Heather's fault for dying such an alluring colorway. (That's my story and I'm sticking to it!)

But some of the blame must also go to Mary Konior (may she rest in peace among a choir of tatting angels). The two-row repeat of her spinning wheel glass mat is positively addicting. "Just one more ring," or "just until the next color change" eat up the tatting time.

And I am equally, if not more, to blame for allowing myself to get distracted by thread and things such as this:

WPlus9 Mehndi Medallions
Lookie what came in the mail – clear stamps that look like tatting. I saw these on one of my obscure, late-night blog crawls. Another crafter had made a gorgeous card featuring one of the stamps and it just leaped off the screen and said, "Don't I look like tatting?"

I was powerless to resist the impulse (Wouldn't you have been? Okay, maybe not.) and bought a set the next day. Late night blog crawling makes you weak.

But what fun I will have creating labels and cards with tatting-like stamps. Already a small, but creative corner of my brain is buzzing with images of tatted teapots affixed to pretty papers with tatting designs stamped, maybe even embossed, on them.

More Beguiling Stamps

Last week I shared a striking stamp from Australia that arrived with samples from The Thread Exchange site Fox launched several weeks ago.  Here are some from the bonny shores of Ireland.

The sender had me at "Eire". Aren't the flowers pretty and inviting? Something about them just says come see our bonny shores for yourself. The sight of them made Ciarrán homesick.

More Love from Postie

As if the stamps, threads and songs weren't enough of a distraction, a book search that I set up several years ago turned up a hardback copy of Cathy Bryant's "Tatting" for a reasonable price. Usually when I find it online it is being sold for some astronomical sum! So I purchased it used from a library in Iowa for $15.00. It is in excellent condition.  Une bonne affaire!

Lizbeth's New Fall Colors

Sneak Peek
Imagine my surprise when a sneak peek of the Lizbeth's Eight New Fall Colors dropped into my inbox:

Solids

Color 696 – Autumn Orange Med

Color 615 – Yellow Lt

Color 619 – Baby Pink

Color 649 – Baby Blue

Variegated Colors
Color 136 – Autumn Spice

Mocha brown dk and med, terra cotta dk, harvest orange dk and lt, olive dk and med.

Color 137 – Berry Burst

Violet dk, boysenberry dk, cornflower blue med, country turquoise dk.

Color 138 – Leafy Greens

Leaf green med, pine green, olive med, leaf green lt.

Color 139 – Fruit Fizz

Raspberry pink med, autumn orange med, melon lt, purple med.

Plus, two more colors that do not yet have scans:

Color 153 – Rainbow Taffy
– Pink lt, autumn orange med, yellow lt, avocado green very lt, electric blue lt, purple med.

Color 154 – Wildflower Garden
– Lilac med, Purple lt, autumn orange med, pink coral med, blossom pink med, olive dk

Wow, that makes 121 colors available in three sizes. To borrow phrasing from Charlotte the barn spider (Charlotte's Web by E. B. White), that's "Some Selection." Terrific!

Have Your Say
Barbara Foster is also asking for your feedback to help her choose which new solid colors and variegated combos to release in December.

This is your chance to choose the colors to get you through those dreary winter days. Or to spice up your sizzlin' hot winter days, depending on which side of the equator you happen to live.

So, what colors would you like to see that are missing from the Lizbeth line?

Leave a comment with your color suggestion(s) on THIS POST or email Barbara Foster directly at staff@hhtatting.com. 


Lizbeth 80
If you're waiting for the latest release information, the following notice went out on Monday, July 5th:

The Lizbeth size 80 thread will not be in stock until the end of August.

If you haven't already heard, the color spacing for the size 80 is shorter, as short as 2.5-3 inches long for some colorways. Others are a little longer. No more tatting (and tatting and tatting) to get to the next color change.

No More Lizbeth at JoAnn's?

On Monday, the Lizbeth 20 display at my local JoAnn Fabric & Crafts store was completely EMPTY. What stock they once had had been put on sale for $1.97 per ball.

When asked if they had discontinued carrying Lizbeth cotton threads, a manager said, "If we have, you might still be able to find some online."

So instead of searching online, I went to the source. Barbara Foster at Handy Hands responded with this information:

No worry, they still have it in some stores, also Hobby Lobby carries 40 colors in all their stores.

Barbara (and a JoAnn customer service representative) explained further.

JoAnn F&C first conducts a 300-store test market sampling to see how a new product sells. Lizbeth sold well in the test markets, so JoAnn has added Lizbeth size 20 thread to its warehouse.

So why the empty display? JoAnn F&C will only stock Lizbeth size 20 thread in 225 of its stores.

JoAnn's has 750 locations in 48 states. That means only 30% of the company's retail locations will stock Lizbeth thread on a regular basis.

The raw data I received from JoAnn's lists 291 locations, not 225. I must presume this is the list of test stores. The CS rep said that some stores may be closing or changing locations, and to expect this data to be "fluid," meaning that the statistics could change frequently.

If you want to see the store data listing which locations (as of today) will continue to carry Lizbeth thread in your state, I am happy to drop the data into a spreadsheet, save it as a PDF file and post the link. Heck, I don't mind tracking the data through September, if it is valuable to tatters.

Do you want to see it?