In the old frame farmhouse on Miller Road in Hampden, where wild turkeys browse under evergreens in the morning, a single lamp burns brightly in the living room late into the night. A tall woman with braided hair sits in an easy chair with a red plastic shuttle in her hand.

Between 4 a.m. and 10 p.m., Viola Miller can be found baking yeast rolls, keeping house and tatting. The 93-year-old farmer’s wife has practiced the century-old craft since she was a teenager. Now, she is passing along the art of making lace with a hand-held shuttle to others.

“I was born with a crochet hook in my hand and brought up under a sewing machine,” she said of the other handcrafts she enjoys doing. “I give my things away almost as fast I make them.”

Tatting involves making knots, which resemble half hitches, and loops known as picots with a hand-held shuttle, or a tatting needle. The craft became popular in the latter half of the 19th century and interest in the skill has waxed and waned since then. Tatted lace is used to decorate handkerchiefs and pillowslips. Tatting can also take the form of doilies, edgings, tablecloths and other items.

“I learned to tat when I was 17,” Miller related one bitter-cold December day. “I went to board with an elderly woman who said I had to learn to tat if I was going to stay with her. She taught me to tat. Before that I didn’t even know what a shuttle was.”

It was 1929 and Miller, a Brewer High School graduate, had just completed a six-week teacher training course at Machias Normal School, which qualified her to teach. Her first teaching job was in Greenbush in a one-room schoolhouse, where she taught all eight grades.

“I practiced all one night,” Miller remembered of learning to tat, “and the first thing I tatted was an edging I put on a handkerchief. I sent that to my mother.” For her first lesson in tatting, she was given ordinary sewing thread, which is not the proper material to use in tatting because it is so fine.

Later on, after she was proficient with the shuttle, Miller taught her mother to tat. “It was one thing I could teach my mother,” she said. “Usually, it’s the other way around, not the daughter teaching the mother.”

Since that first experience of learning and teaching tatting, Miller, who was born at Caswell Plantation on what became Loring Air Force Base – “my father’s farm,” she said – has lost track of the number of women and girls she has taught to tat over the years. “It must be hundreds,” she said. “At one time not so long ago, I had 13 women sitting on the floor in my living room while they learned to tat.”

Miller does not hold formal classes in tatting. Those who learn to tat from her tell others, and so on, creating a word-of-mouth network about the lady who knows her knots and picots.

One of the women she taught to tat was Cindy Boucher, 45, of Winterport.

“It was the fulfillment of a desire I’d had for a long time,” Boucher said of learning to tat. “I’d asked a lot of other women about tatting, but no one knew what it was. I thought it was a lost art.”

Boucher said that she didn’t know how she came by an awareness of tatting and what it was, but remembered that as a child she and her sister received from elderly aunts handkerchiefs decorated with an edging they believed was tatted.

“Viola is a wonderful teacher,” Boucher said. “She’s patient and has a good sense of humor. It’s amazing that she has all those patterns in her head and can figure out a pattern just by looking at a picture.”

With her shuttle and fine cotton thread, Boucher has made Christmas tree ornaments and has a table runner in progress.

“I’ll keep at it because I don’t want to lose [the skill]. I’ll try to pass it on to my daughter. It’s such beautiful handwork. I’d hate to see it lost [as an art],” Boucher said.

For many years, Miller taught sewing in the 4-H and county Extension programs.

“I used to tell them, ‘You’ll be happier if you take that out and do it over again,'” she said of teaching youngsters to sew. “Later on I’d hear some of the girls say, ‘Aunt Vi expects perfection.'”

These days Miller confines her tatting to small items such as Christmas tree ornaments, wreaths she makes into lapel pins, snowman decorations, and crosses that can be used as bookmarks.

“I wish I’d kept a record of all those people I’ve taught to tat,” Miller said. “There’s not 20 days in the year that I haven’t taught someone how to tat.”

Ardeana Hamlin welcomes suggestions. Call 990-8153, or e-mail ahamlin@bangordailynews.net.

Tatting classes and supplies

Tatting classes are offered at the Yard Goods Center in Waterville by request. Call the store at 872-5403 to schedule a tatting instruction session. The store also sells tatting shuttles, needles and DMC Cedelia thread used in tatting.

Pieces of Eight Yarn Store in Presque Isle offers tatting classes at 2, 4 and 6 p.m. every Thursday. Instructor is Heidi Campbell, an 18-year veteran of tatting, who taught herself to tat. The store sells tatting supplies. For more information, call 762-5437.

Jo-Ann Fabrics, 942-6551, in Bangor; Cityside Yarn Co., 990-1455, in Bangor; and Shirley’s, 667-7158, in Hancock also stock tatting supplies. Shirley’s sells tatting patterns and instruction books. Craft World, 942-8801, in Bangor sells tatting shuttles and needles.