Honour amongst geckos!

OK the last of the silly gecko photos. Glad to see that the little one finally got a lift!!



Jane Eborall has designed a gecko tatting pattern for me. Go look at my 25 motif challenge blog to see my first tatted geckos and read a bit more about geckos.

Geckos coming home!

Well it's dusk and the geckos are wending their weary way home after going to see Jane's gecko (no they didn't call at the pub on their way Jane!). They seem very tired and don't seem to have much consideration for the poor little chap at the back.
They seem to have encouraged Jane to keep tatting the gecko.



One more piece of gecko memorabilia was staring me in the face all the time, our wall mirror, made in Indonesia was a gift from a friend who came to stay.

Geckos on the move!

I was sitting having my lunch today when I suddenly noticed that the geckos that I had casually put down on the sideboard after I had photographed them had suddenly become organised and were on the move!

This really gives a feeling of their size and variety. I wonder where they are heading so purposefully. Perhaps they heard that Jane has nearly finished the tatted gecko and are off for a peak!

A Celebration of 'Gecko-ness'

I am sure you know by now that hubby and I are nuts about geckos.
My friend Jane Eborall is designing a gecko in tatting for me and was asking me should her design have skinnier legs, longer legs or what.
Well geckos come in the most extraordinary shapes and sizes so hers is going to be a sort of generic gecko that can be tweaked in to a number of different specific geckos.

When you are gecko mad you begin to see geckos everywhere you go and I don't mean living ones. It seems that the whole world has a love affair with the cuteness of the gecko and so it is easy to find a gecko momento wherever you go.

Not that we actively go out looking for them they seem to find us!! as well as family and friends finding them the perfect gift.

So this article is a celebration of some of our Gecko collection.

The smallest is a tiny beaded gecko I made, just under 4cm he would make a lovely earring. the pattern is in 'Beadlings How to Make Beaded Creatures and Creations' a Klutz book.



Another beaded gecko is a key ring that I came across in Germany, here he is together with the little one to show the size (about 10cm). A very clever design of beads and wire.



The largest ones I have are a pair of cast iron geckos at 30cm which looked great in the garden until they showed signs of rust and had to take up residence on a windowsill.



They came from the gecko meeting in Germany that we go to every year along with is my latest aquisition, another large metal one with an eyelet underneath so he can be hung on a wall.



Almost every market stall wherever we go has paperweight geckos, brightly coloured materials filled with sand. We have these too but they seem to have gone walkabout.
A variation on this theme was given to me by a friend and is a stuffed gecko sewn onto a zipped purse.



Of course I know you all will want to know what is so special about geckos apart from their cuteness. The answer lies in their feet.
A gecko can run up a vertical sheet of glass holding on by means of it's 'sticky' foot pads. But they aren't really sticky at all, the underside is covered in millions of tiny hairs, down to molecular level and they interact with the walking surface, kind of like 'velcro' except that they can release a lot easier.
There is a lot of research ongoing to try to find out exactly how this works and if it can be of use to mankind.

Geckos are the only vertebrates that can bend their toes upwards as well as downwards.
This is a great advantage if they are walking over a dusty surface and don't want to get dust between the tiny hairs they can curl their toes upwards as they walk to keep the pads of the ground.

The ability to walk up a shiny surface enables them to walk along shiny leaves or up a tree with very smooth bark. A great help in running away from predators.

For realism it's hard to beat the rubberised gecko here, you can almost see those toes curling up.



Now for something unique, this is a handpainted gecko mug commissioned in England by my son for his dad, geckos solve a lot of birthday problems.



Here is my gecko plate that I painted at my daughters hen party last year, it looked wonderful until it had an accident in the firing, still you can't win them all!




Cute! yes we do cute too. Here is my favorite fridge magnet, a little gecko with magnets in his feet, he is a real poser and lives on the cooker hood at the moment, tho we never know where he will turn up next.


This tiny little resin gecko is sitting on a real nut and I think was made in South America.




Finally some more unusual hand made geckos, staring with a hand carved painted gecko from Mauritius This is characteristic of the brightly coloured 'day geckos' found on the island.


A beautifully carved specimen, 21 cm long, look at his lovely eyes.




Saving the best 'til last, here is a recent gift from an Australian friend.




12 cm long and made from 'Fimo'clay isn't he exquisite. he is the work of Jon Anderson of Fimocreations, go and have a look at his work.

Hope you enjoyed seeing these, you should see the T-shirt collection!!!!!!!!!!

Chicago! Been there, done that, got the t-shirt!

As soon as life began to get back to normal the next event took us away to America.

Alan was to give a talk at a symposium in Chicago on New Caledonian Geckos...his talk was first so that enabled him to sit back and enjoy the rest of the talks.

This is a map of the pacific island of New Caledonia only home of the Rhacodactylus geckos

One of his babies!
It was a great event, there are so many enthusiasts in the States that we had not met before, but we greatly missed a good friend from Germany and instigator of the symposium who died earlier this year.
The t-shirt is a beauty very wearable,showing two of the geckos that Alan keeps.





















Rhacodactylus ciliatus..the crested gecko













and on the back...

Rhacodactylus leachianus...the giant gecko, the biggest gecko of all, grows to 12 inches.






The meeting was timed to coincide with a huge reptile show. I wanted to tat a gecko but didn't have a pattern that was do-able so tatted a snake instead. We are not snake people but there were some beauties at the show as well as geckos, and our favorite chamaeleons.



I was delighted with the way the stripes worked out with this Altin basak thread. the pattern is Dianna Stevens Snake Bookmark.
This Chamaeleon would have been a real challege for my variagated thread!


My second snake in variagated Flora thread looked more like this chamaeleon in his party colours!!

This little gecko was a wow!!




After the show we had a couple of days to explore Chicago an achitecturally stunning city

and then it was off to see some more of the States.
First stop was Lafayette, Indiana, where I was to meet with tatters Gina and Bette.

Living proof that tatting it alive and well all over the world. That was such a treat, virtual friends from the internet becoming 'real' friends. In almost 50 years of tatting I could count the number of tatters that I have met on one hand, I am doing my best to create as many as I can to help this beautiful craft to survive.

That was where the shopping began....for anything tatting related. Michaels and Hobby Lobby I had never been to before and together with Vons beads and others my luggage was going to burst with beads,now I just need to live long enough to use them all!

If it hadn't been for tatting friends we would never have wandered round Indiana and would have missed Purdue University campus, another Indianan treat.

During our time in Chicago the weather had been glorious, almost t-shirt weather but now it began to change exactly as forecast. After we left Lafayette it gradually deteriorated first to rain on our day in the delightful Shipshewana (handcraft heaven), and then to flurries of snow in AnnArbor Michigan.

As we drove north up as far as Grand Haven the weather went from blizzards of snow and leaves to scenes of blue sky and snow inches deep. Never have I seen tree covered in snow and leaves at the same time, it was stunning.

I couldn't believe how much Lake Michigan looked like the sea, huge waves and lots of sand and even dunes. Boy it was windy!!




Driving back down to Chicago the warm weather gradually returned and we ended our stay with a visit to the son of my best buddy, another treat.

One of the highlights of the trip was to go to Ann Arbor. That has been a name in my life ever since I met Alan some 40 years ago. he had lived there for a year in 1949 when he was 7. His parents had been part of one of the first Anglo/American teacher exchanges. It had such an big influence on their lives, they even gave it's name to their retirement house.
In the school holidays they bought a Buick and drove from Michigan to California and back taking hundreds of colour slides. On their return to England his dad was for ever in demand to show his slides, a rarity in those days. Alan always had difficulty distinguishing what he actually remembered and what he rembered from seeing the slides.
We found the street where they lived and wondered if he would recognise the house that he lived in as a seven year old. A bit of a long shot but he finally fixed on one that 'looked right', the right size with the right porch and a shed in the back garden where he remembered his host doing wood turning.

We also found his school but that sparked no memories at all, obviously tobogganing down his street was much more memorable than school!!


When we got home I looked up the number in his dad's book and whoo hoo he was right. Cool!! Quite a feat as it was a very long street, a real trip down memory lane.