craftgrrl | I'm new! And I come bearing pictures!

Hello! My name's Krystal, and I'm a 19 yr old college student. My crafty activities include candlemaking, beadwork, knitting, crochet, friendship bracelets, cross stitch, soapmaking, decoupage, playing with Shrinky Dinks, rubber stamping, and probably some other things I forgot. But what brought me here is tatting.

I started teaching myself how to tat around a year and a half ago. I used instructions I found on the internet and books from the library. I never tried needle tatting - I jumped right into using a shuttle.

This is a doily I made last year for the parents of my then-boyfriend for Christmas. I used size 20 hand-dyed silk thread in pale yellow, and it came out to 6"-7" in diameter.

Currently I am working on a doily to enter in the Minnesota State Fair. It won't be very large, as the pattern called for size 20 or 30 thread, and I went with size 50 Flora (in "painted" red, white, and blue), but it's my first time entering any of my tatting in any sort of competition. Here's what it looks like so far, except I have a little more of the row done:

I looked around, and noticed the last post about tatting is from almost a year ago! Who has picked it up since then? I would love to hear that other people here tat as well.

And just for fun, here's the candles I've recently made:

My mom likes to burn those little Yankee Candle tarts. She burns each one 3 times and then puts the warmer in the fridge to pop the wax out. I save all the wax disks and re-melt them to make candles. Every single candle there was made from former tarts (the top one has milky chunks of wax in it - looks pretty funky). I have more molds than that, but I tend to stick to the hexagon.

I think that's about it. This looks like a great community!