New earrings, vintage handkerchief

 New tatted earrings to go with a hot pink and deep navy striped shirt that I acquired recently. I choose Lizbeth #620 for the hot pink, and added my own hand dyed "Blackbird" for the dark color. The earring pattern is "Quadrille", for sale in my Etsy shop and also on Craftsy. I modified the pattern just slightly by using 2 colors, adding a few extra seed beads, and substituting a 4mm round crystal pearl for the teardrop.

The vintage handkerchief is something that I recently purchased from another Etsy seller, and I am very happy to have it, since it appears to be a very old piece of tatting. It has the picots sewn together, not joined. According to tatting history, this would place the time it was made before 1851, or possibly later by someone still using the sewn picot method. The reason for guessing it is prior to 1851, is because that's when a book called "Tatting Made Easy" was published, giving directions for joining picots by pulling up a loop of the working thread through the picot and putting the shuttle through, the way we do today. The author of that book was listed only as "a lady".

I haven't been able to find the book in any of the Online Public Domain archives that I've seen so far, but there are many other vintage tatting books available as free downloads. A good article about tatting history by Virginia Mescher is on Georgia Seitz' website.

I admire the skill and patience of tatters of times past, but I'm so very grateful to be living in the 21st century with all the exciting options available to us now.