Tatting and teacups

 While I still have several more countries to visit, I'm tired. Like really tired. Not necessarily of drinking tea, or writing about tea. Rather, I work for a hospital, and if you haven't noticed, there's a pandemic on. Thankfully my job doesn't involve patient care, or face to face contact with the public. I drive in to the office every day, and listen to my coworkers fight with each other. Actually now that we have moved to the new office, we're all in separate cubes, and it's harder to fight or hear people fight when they are more spread out with walls of any sort between them. Everyone in my department is wearing PPE that we have either made or boughten ourselves. The single, disposable face shield I was given at the beginning of all this is completely useless, and while they did eventually offer to buy hard shell face shields for employees in my department, the people who did get them discovered they really don't work with our headsets. So, to Amazon to buy face shields that will fit right. There are a limited number of disposable masks available in the hall, but since we don't work with patients or the public, they want us to wear cloth masks to save on the disposable mask supply. I can understand that. 

At this point, I've been told we were the 15th hospital a facility had called looking for a bed. Thankfully the caller was told in the middle of our call that one of those 14 previous hospitals accepted the patient. By proxy of calls I have received, I know that hospitals from Indiana to Colorado are full. While healthcare providers, healthcare organizations, hospitals, and public health experts have begged our governor to do anything to slow the spread, she refuses. There is no mask mandate because she thinks people will do the right thing. Given our infection rate, they aren't. Go to any store, they aren't. The emphasis is on the fact that our state is open and ready for business. While we are said to have one of the lowest rates of unemployment in the country, we are routinely in the top 5 states with the highest infection rate. 

So thanks to a project inspired by a friend who was feeling down, I decided to start taking pictures of my tea ware with pieces of lace I have made. I started with my Moroccan tea cups, and some tatted medallions that I wear on a chain for necklaces. The geometric patterns remind me of Morocco, as pictures show geometric patterns on buildings as decoration. For those who are not familiar with hand made lace, tatting is a specific technique for making lace. It is not the generic term for all hand made lace. Tatting is made by knotting thread over a a central piece of thread. The decorative knots slide over the central piece of thread, and tatting is characterized by patterns involving rings and chains.