The Shuttle Brothers

The Shuttle Brothers

The husky Houtz brothers’ unabashed dedication to doilies and other handmade dainties might inspire jokes. But no one makes cracks within earshot of the brawny duo—not even the football players who Gary once coached. Instead, their coach’s small trademark butterfly designs were tied to their shoelaces as good-luck charms.

Gary and Randy Houtz, both 6-foot-5, have taken the delicate art of tatting to new heights. Their beefy hands have tatted with everything from fine-gauge wire to thick rope. Gary, 55, says tatting, the accumulation of individual knots into intricate designs and patterns, is the only type of lacework not reproducible by machine.

Sure, the Houtz boys make the traditional doilies, beaded snowflakes, dangling jewelry and feminine clothing for their wives, but they are also daring innovators. Randy, 51, has tatted a lengthy cornstalk, a bouquet of whimsical flowers, a giant black spider and various insects.

A tatting guild in the Pacific Northwest requested his tatted spider to study for duplication.

In some respects, though, the revolutionary Houtzes are tatting purists. Randy pulls a small tatted three-dimensional angel out of a cloth pouch. Silvery knots form the halo, and the angel’s wings and gown are lovely loops of white thread. Randy says the charming design was the creation of a South Dakota woman, but she chose to use a wooden bead for the angel’s head. “A wooden bead!” he says in disbelief. “When you can tat an angel’s head.”

Gary says he won’t live long enough to try every design he conceives. He spent 600 hours spinning a veil of exquisite interlocking stars for his son’s bride. “I’ll never do that again for anybody,” he says with conviction.

In the Houtzes’ weekly “Tat and Chat” classes from September through May, as many as a dozen women gather around the brothers in the lunchroom of the Bayfield Elementary School in their hometown of Bayfield, Colo. (pop. 1,549).

“They blow my mind,” says Durangoan Donna Edwards, herself a nationally certified tatting teacher and author of two how-to books. “They’ve added one little loop and opened up a whole new world. I’ll never catch up to them.” She’s referring to the Houtzes’ “Self-Closing Mock Ring.” Tatting’s accumulated knots form chains, some of which are closed into rings. The Houtz mock ring is a special sort of lock stitch to close a chain into a ring without any puckering. Their book on it rocked the tatting world.

The Houtzes travel all over the country to teach tatting, sometimes getting standing ovations from students. Gary recalls how at the first international tatting conference they attended, the instructor stopped the class when they walked in. “Can I help you?” she asked.

“We’re here to tat,” Gary answered.

“No, really, why are you here?” she said. She assumed we were maintenance workers, Gary says.

Tatting has been a bond for the two brothers, who spend hours on the telephone with each other discussing tatting motifs. Gary first became enamored with tatting as a little boy at his grandmother’s kitchen table, where she sat each morning listening to the radio and tying her decorative knots. She didn’t teach Gary how to tat, though.

As an adult, Gary, indulged his interest in stitchery and learned to crochet, embroider, macramé and knit. But he lost his zeal for each as he mastered it, he says. When he finally learned tatting, he knew he could never exhaust its creative possibilities.

“I tat, therefore I am,” he says.

After Gary, an accountant, moved from Salt Lake City to Bayfield, he lured his little brother Randy, a natural resource specialist for the U.S. Forest Service, into tatting in 1994.

Noticing that burly Gary easily broke flimsy plastic shuttles, the gizmos that hold the spools of thread used in tatting, Randy, a craftsman, began carving sturdier shuttles for his brother.

Randy soon acquired his brother’s love for all things tatting. And the shuttles he carved from wood or bone and inlaid with gems and silver are museum pieces that are coveted in tatting circles worldwide, from England to Japan.

The Houtzes are now widely known as the Shuttle Brothers, even though they haven’t exploited the demand to launch a full-blown business in shuttles.

“We mass produce them,” Gary jokes. “One at a time.”

Electa Draper writes for The Denver Post.

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