Karen Bovard/The ShuttleSmith: Tatter turned Author, Silversmith, Enamelist
My journey to this, my Etsy Store, started several decades ago when my maternal grandmother taught me to tat in rural northeast Nebraska (I'm a 'farmer's daughter'). I tatted everything I could, especially during my college years when tatting, a cheap & portable artform, provided me a stress-reducing outlet. After college, I turned my love for tatting towards teaching others including taking tatting 'on the road' to national needlework shows where I strived to convert 'cross-stitchers' to become 'tatters'. It was also after college that I started making sterling silver tatting shuttles and chose the monacer/name of 'The ShuttleSmith'. Eventually I decided to put my love for tatting into a more physical, written form and used my time to learn how to put my tatting designs (in the form of Split Ring Tatting technique) into illustrations, then laid out into a book, and eventually printed/published. It was at this time that I turned The ShuttleSmith name into The ShuttleSmith Publishing Company. Eventually I turned back around to tatting shuttle making when I discovered the fun of enameling. I will have to let you in on a little secret: everything in my world revolves around tatting! When I was introduced to enameling, I immediately thought about how could I apply the technique to create tatting shuttles. I now have a fairly extensive enameling studio in which I get to play with color. My tatting pattern design work (check out my books!) has sent me down the avenue of putting serious color into tatting, but enameling tatting shuttles is a more instantaneous color-fix!
