"The process of making Lace Doilies"

I am not a tatter (one who makes lace), and I own no doilies (alas), so you almost stumped me with this topic. But, what with technology these days, a few clicks on the Google pointed me in the direction of someone kind enough to help me defend my facade of wisdom: Lady Shuttlemaker, tatter extraordinaire.

The process of making a lace doily is called tatting a doily. When you tat a doily, you basically make thousands of tiny little knots to create lace in your chosen doily design. According to Lady Shuttlemaker, it can take "weeks and weeks and dozens of hours" to tat a lace doily; she once made a doily that was comprised of 9,456 double knots. That's a lot of freaking knots.

Needless to say, making lace doilies is pretty hard and time-consuming work and, as Lady Shuttlemaker pointed out, so many things can go wrong: You can have thread run out on you. You can have thread break or get tangled. You can make tragic miscalculations in your pattern that "can take hours to correct and be disastrous to one's enthusiasm." Indeed. Unless you really, really wanted that lace doily on your table, the odds are great that you may just abandon the whole project altogether. 

Take it from me, I know. Although I have never had the pleasure of tatting a doily in my life (but I have quite enjoyed saying "tat a doily" in the last few days), I did once start a cross-stitch quilt that featured a pastel picture of baby animals romping around in the jungle. This was supposed to be a gift to my newborn nephew. He's two now. At the rate I'm going on this blanket, he'll get it just in time to take it with him to college...or, you know, never.

Things that require a ton of effort on our part are naturally - surprise surprise - the hardest things to complete, especially when you have no real obligation to anyone or anything to ever see them through. When I take a stroll through Memory Lane, I always stumble upon a heap of rubble made up of the things I started and then put aside for whatever reason. I obviously didn't care enough to see these things through to completion, but why, then, do I always feel a little guilty and regretful that I didn't finish what I started? 

When we were in school, we were forced to complete all our homework and see all our projects to the close. Otherwise, we'd fail the class. Although we are not being graded on our lives, perhaps it doesn't feel good to have incomplete endeavors hanging over our heads because they are, in essence, failures on our part. They're a reflection of the effort we couldn't find, the time we didn't carve out, the commitment we shrugged off. Finishing something like a doily may not rank as an extremely important affair on the activities we can engage in, so it's understandable that things like this might get pushed off for a later date, but to fail to ever complete it? Well, you take a walk down Memory Lane and tell me if there aren't a few things you don't regret finishing. They may not make you feel all that bad, but they may not make you feel all that proud of anything, either. 

In completing something to the end, we stretch our limits of patience and effort, and the reward is not only the completion of the project, but pride in the classic cliche: Overcoming A Challenge. In fact, we may be surprised at how meaningful an activity turns out to be, precisely because of how miserable it was. 

As Lady Shuttlemaker says, "Tatting is very time consuming, but I think because of the time and work involved, it is also very rewarding in the end."

So go on, you - tat that doily. And don't forget to finish it.

Thank you to Brian Wendlandt of New York City for this topic. Thank you also to Lady Shuttlemaker for her time and tatting knowledge. Visit her Etsy shop at www.LadyShuttlemaker.Etsy.com.

Comments

[melissa]

Wow, Anna. And thank you, Lady Shuttlemaker.

As a former member of a profession that prides itself on finishing miserable things to the end, I'm here to say that yes, there's something to be said for it. There's also something to be said for saying, "Hello, miserable, arduous task- and no thank you." Or maybe I am still trying to validate my newfound quitter's instinct...

[Anna Swanson]

I agree, Melissa! There is something to be said for both. I advocate for sticking with miserably challenging tasks to the end...and saying "no thank you" to that which makes you just plain miserable. Great point!