TIAS and Tatting Tea Tuesday

We’ve reached the end of the 2014 TIAS.  It was a lot of fun (when isn’t it?), with a sailboat at the end. 
 The “Knotty Thought” in Lizbeth size 20 # 130 Island Breeze and # 657 Ocean Turquoise Dark
I must have been a bit psychic to choose threads that go so well with a nautical theme don’t you think?

Today for Tatting Tea Tuesday I bring you progress on my vest.
I picked it up again – finally.  I started it in April of 2013, got as far as finishing the collar then put it down and didn’t pick it up again until about a month ago. Since then I’ve put about 20 hours into it. This is the center of the back.  I’m hoping that my ideas for this work out. 
Today I’m drinking Peppermint Tea with a touch of honey out of a cup I found at Goodwill.  It stood out amid quite a variety of cups and mugs in it’s color and decoration, the only one of it’s kind there.  The cup caught my eye, with it’s blueberries and blossoms.  I thought it was Corelle but it has ‘epoch’ on the bottom. So for the whopping price of 50 cents I brought it home. It obviously doesn’t hold as much as one of the mugs I’m used to drinking from, but I enjoy using it. 
Did you know there is quite the connection between sailing ships and tea? There was a time when clipper ships brought tea from China to England.  The tea clippers actually raced to be the first to make it back from China.  Those ships must have been quite the sight to see.  There is only one of the clippers left, the Cutty Sark, in dry dock in London. How much easier it is to get tea now, but without the romance of sailing ships!

“Happily, one great tea clipper has survived and is now in dry dock at Greenwich in London. Cutty Sark, launched from the Clyde on  22 November 1869, was one of the last tea clippers to be constructed.  Built for John ‘White Hat’ Willis, she was intended to win the annual clipper race, although in fact she never beat her biggest rival, Thermopylae.  The decline of the clipper tea trade meant that Cutty Sark only carried tea until 1877, but she survived many later incarnations, and is now the only remaining tea clipper in the world.  Small to modern eyes, Cutty Sark is nonetheless breathtakingly beautiful, and a visit offers a fascinating insight into the life of a tea clipper.” 

from the UK Tea Council
The Cutty Sark at Grenwich in London

I linked to Artful Affirmations for her Tea Cup Tuesday