By Roxanne Moore Saucier, Bangor Daily News Staffwriter
Even when she’s sitting in an airport, people are prone to looking over her shoulder as she manipulates her loom — also known as her hand. Splaying her fingers wound with thread so fine, she used the other hand to pop the three-inch piece of plastic back and forth so dexterously it might be a violin bow.
Actually, it’s a shuttle, and Elaine O’Donal is a tatter. The particular lace she makes may wind up as a Christmas ornament, an earring, a doily, a collar or a bit of trim on a vest, or the beginning of a tablecloth.
O’Donal has been tatting – making knotted lace – for 18 years now. The 40-something Gorham woman, whose husband run O’Donal Nurseries in the same town, took up the craft as a young mother.
“I’ve always loved lace,” she recalled. Initially, O’Donal pored over printed instructions without much success. “I stumbled around with books for a year.”
What she needed was someone to show her how to get started tatting.“That was Clare Libby. She taught a number of people in the area,” she said. Libby has since died, but O’Donal still has a few of the shuttles passed on to her by Libby’s son.
Once she got the knack of tatting, O’Donal began giving things to family and friends, then went on to selling them. In 1985, she opened her own business, Tatted Webs, and now she works full time at the craft.
Does she ever.
O’Donal shows her work in a half-dozen shops and at some 14 shows a year in New England and New York. She belongs to organizations such as Lacemakers of Maine, and educational groups such as International Lacers and Ring of Tatters.
For professionals, she added, “It’s also good to get into reputable groups like United Maine Craftsmen, which puts on very good shows.” Shows organized by promoters sometimes are not as good, she said.
“Then you have to learn who your audience is,” she said. Even for the experienced crafter, the task can be tricky. Framed tatting may sell quickly at one show, and ornaments at another. Handwork vendors have an advantage at venues that draw groups such as bus tours, though. “You can’t take a chair home on the bus,” she pointed out.
Often O’Donal is the only tatter at a show or exhibition. People are surprised she is so young. The other reaction she gets, always, is “Woe, This is a long lost art.”
It only seems that way, she emphasized. Tatting is the stuff of old trunks and antique dealers — O’Donal herself has collected old pieces and preserved them from further disintegration. And it’s true she knows only about five or so serious tatters around the state who practice the craft on a regular basis. Some have to give it up when their fingers grow arthritic or eyesight fails.
But more populous, urban areas in other states often have tatting groups that meet for reasons that are social as well as practical, “like quilting bees,” she said.
When there’s a real desire to learn, those inspired to tat will find a way.
One of those was Judy Lambert, who has tatted pieces from her family hanging on the walls in King’s Daughters Home in Bangor, a residence for young women where she and husband Rick have been the directing team for the past five years. She’s added to the collection by purchasing items at yard sales.
Lambert looks at a tatted collar, a cuff and a piano scarf as thought seeing them for the first time.
Pointing to one piece of tatting from decades ago, she said, “This was so precious back then, they would have saved this, cut it out and used it over.”
Lambert consider herself a beginner, though she has completed small items such as bookmarks. She learned tatting from a friend who spent time with a tatter and learned just because she knew Lambert was so intent on getting instruction.
“I began with big cotton thread because it’s so hard,” she explained. Tatters from long ago made the craft “by the yard,” she said. “It would have gone around anything and everything,” from clothing to pieces covering tables and other furniture.
“I cannot imagine women did yards and yards of that without error,” she said. “There’s nothing to measure it by. I can’t unravel it. I have to take a tiny little crochet hook and pick it out” if there’s a mistake.
O’Donal, of course, is more experienced, to the point that she can chat or look through magazine while easily keeping count of her tatting stitches. And she likes using the smaller thread that frustrates some tatters. “The finer the work, the better I like it, personally,” she said.
O’Donal herself has taught more than 100 people how to tat in recent years. Beginning in January, she will teach adult education classes in Cumberland and Gorham. Her students not only learn the basics, but the importance of exercising the wrists and taking breaks, she said, adding that working on different types of projects also is a good idea.
She currently is hard at work on a tablecloth a customer ordered for Christmas. It’s nearly a year since she bagan the piece, which at 50 inches square will use more than one pound of crochet cotton.
“It’s so repetitive, I work on other items, then come back to it,” she explained.
O’Donal has designed many one-of-a-kind items, from a lacy collar that took second prize in an international competition to a three-dimensional rose that will fit in a bridal bouquet, then be saved as an heirloom once the live flowers have been tossed.
“And I made a yarmulke once – all tatted, for a bar mitzvah,” she said.