They suit my hand as they did Grandma’s.Ī native of the remote town of Rapsani, nestled on the olive-laden slopes of Mount Olympus in Greece, Grandpa immigrated to Monmouth, Illinois, in the 1910s. Forty years later, I am still tatting and using shuttles that Grandpa made sixty years ago. I began collecting patterns from books and shared my limited knowledge with schoolyard friends. If I tried to break off a ring that was not going well, perhaps coughing to cover the snap, she’d say, “I heard that.” There was no fooling Grandma. No snapping off of mistake-ridden thread was permitted: I was to pick out my mistakes with a pin. When I was eight years old, Grandma sat me down with one of her wooden shuttles and size 80 thread and began teaching me to tat. She had dozens of balls of DMC thread in wondrous colors. (IOLI, an international organization for lacemakers), and she bought books, experimented with patterns, and filled notebooks and cards with original patterns. Grandma was a member of the International Old Lacers Inc. Shuttles from the author’s collection and examples of Charlotte Sedwick Nicolaides’s tatting. I find the bold colors and three-dimensional designs of the latter pieces particularly fascinating and amusing. She tatted sweet, simple, blue-and-white edgings to adorn my nightgowns she also tatted vivid, variegated aqua and hot pink antimacassars for her 1940s-era overstuffed chairs. Her favorite wooden shuttles, crafted by Grandpa, ticked rhythmically in a soothing, hypnotic tempo. Without looking at her work, fingers flying, she turned out yards of edgings that she rolled into a ball in her lap, securing her work with a giant safety pin. Fifty years later, she tatted like a machine. ![]() Needlework publications were filled with patterns for this particularly feminine art-tatting was a graceful pastime, its swift, rhythmic movements resulting in yards of beautiful lace. At its peak in the nineteenth century, tatting embellished the edges of cuffs, collars, and undergarments, as well as constituting the fabric itself of such three-dimensional textiles as baby bonnets, purses, and booties. The lacemaking technique of tatting began in the sixteenth century as an elaboration of simple knotting, and it evolved over the next three centuries. In my case, they are wooden tatting shuttles that my grandfather Anastasius “Tom” Nicolaides (1890–1966) made for my grandmother Charlotte Sedwick Nicolaides (1901–1984). Many of us treasure special needlework tools that have come down to us from our ancestors, perhaps an unusual bone crochet hook that our mother used or handcrafted knitting needles inherited from a great-aunt.
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