A Little of This and A Little of That

I have been tatting, not that you would know it from reading here. Some days I feel busier than a one armed paperhanger with so many things on the go that require my attention it's hard to prioritize.Days always go better when I'm up before hubby because it gives me some quiet time to read my Bible and talk things over with the Lord before the busy of life gets in the way. We take time to read the Word and pray together daily, but I still need the personal time with God and really notice when I don't have it.
The 25 Motif Challenge can take up a lot of my time if it's not handled regularly. I thank God for the many volunteers who have stepped in to help. As the interest in the challenge has grown, keeping up with it went from a pleasure to a pain and without the wonderful folks who volunteer their time it wouldn't be nearly as much fun. We have recently added some new volunteers and that takes a bit of extra time sending them out the information they need and answering questions they have. The Challenge has clearly kept people tatting and created another point of contact for the tatting community.
The Tatting Round Robins have been popular and you'd think that once everyone has their partner information, that my involvement would be over, and most of the time that would be true. The very first group of round robins I co-ordinated ran into all kinds of hiccups. Some of them went off without a hitch and others experienced all manner of road blocks, some of which are still being sorted out 2 years later. Many of these little speed bumps have been related to unexpected accidents and illness that have hampered people from completing their obligations.

If you are someone like my sister who checks email once every week or two, sorting things out can take a very long time. In the interim I can get 5 messages from other participant who are online every day. Last year the individual groups had leaders that collected the pictures for posting on the blogs and helped herd everyone toward the finish line. The most recent groups have been plagued with not only illness but also technical problems due to crashed computers.
This year I started the Design-Tat group to help people create their own designs. I'm not an expert, but there are some things I've learned from doing it wrong the first time, that may encourage other people to spread their wings. I had though of doing it as a paid class because of the time involvement, but I didn't because A- I didn't think I had all that much to teach, and B- I didn't think that there would be that many people interested. I had anticipated that 2 or 3 people might want to know what I know and I had to cut the group off at 60 because there was no way I could personally answer the design challenges of that many people. Really, I think a lot of the folks that joined, just did so out of curiosity, but I have another dozen people that have emailed since asking if they could join. So I'll be doing another course soon.

On the work front, hubby has completed some new software and I helped out with Beta testing and writing the help manual which required setting the software up in a logical manner for doing screen shots that could be incorporated into the manual and the web pages. These had to be done twice. The first were done in a small size for the manual and the second set were done larger and created with transparent backgrounds for use on the web site. We have been fortunate to already have several users promote the software, so we are very encouraged by that.

Things have been especially challenging over the last few weeks as our high speed connection was out and a lot of my "normal" activities are very graphic and require that high speed connection.
In the in between minutes I have been doing some tatting that will go into an upcoming book. I have the designs done and I'm tatting up some additional samples for filming. That's one of the reasons that there haven't been any pictures, as it's all a surprise.