tatmom.com

This is my much-neglected lace making site…it has had a few permutations over the years, but I haven’t really done anything with it for a couple of years now.
The name for the site and the tagline have a little story behind them, of course ;-) When I was pregnant for The Boy, I usually had tatting tucked in my purse at all times. I’d pull it out whenever I had a spare minute or two. It’s portable, easy to pick up/set down, and since we were on a *very* limited budget, I usually gave it as gifts whenever possible.
The night I went into pre-term labor, I had tatting in my purse – I was actually making a doily for the nursery. I had been checked by the doctor and nurses, they had shot me full of drugs to try to stop labor, and I reached into my purse and pulled out my tatting and laid there on my left side and tatted to try to calm myself down.
The contractions picked up – mind you, I was only 20 weeks pregnant! – and so I set down the tatting and breathed through the contractions and prayed and tried to clear my mind of any thought other than the fact that my child had been given to me by God, and he simply had to be ok.
I heard footsteps rushing down the hall, and a nurse burst into the room – she scooped up my tatting, looked at it with a baffled expression, and said “I don’t even know what this is, but when you do it, the contractions let up. So DO IT!!”
So all through the next 17 weeks, I tatted. And tatted. And tatted. I churned out yard after yard of lace, some ornaments, experimented with creating new edgings.
I found a wonderful group of online tatters (mind you, this was in 2003, so I think I found them via Ask Jeeves – anyone remember that search engine?!) I shared my story, and someone there decided that “tatmom” would be the perfect user name for me. Of course, The Boy was known as “tatbaby” until we knew his gender for sure ;-) He would tolerate me tatting for a while, then he would press his back into my spine and kick and kick and kick until he’d knock the tatting off my stomach – when you’re on bedrest and unable to do *anything* at all, you’ve read every book you can talk people into bringing in, and you have no television, well, that’s pretty amusing! At least it gave me something to think about instead of counting contraction after endless contraction, right?
So anyway…tatmom. It’s not about tattoos, although honestly that’s where a lot of my traffic comes from. I do laugh whenever I imagine the faces of those people expecting a tattooed woman and instead they are met with delicate Victorian-era lace…but then I’m kind of sadistic that way

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