have to *stop and think* what the last letter of a word might be)...
No, just straight memorization.
C= 2 over 3; N= 2 and 4 over 1 and 2. You don't need to associate it with
words unless you want to.
There's *nothing* "straight" about memorization, as far as I'm concerned; it's for the birds (those, whose memory still functions <g>)... Association with words is not a matter of choice for me; words are what I remember (and I expect that, any day, I'll wake up to find that I can no longer speak/write English at all; it's already beginning to "leak" away). I'm one of those people who do not say "ay, oh, el, ay" for IOLI; for me, it's "yolee"... All those "MADD" and "SAD" abbreviations have been invented for people like me; I cannot remember a string of letters any more than I can remember a string of numbers (there are times I have trouble with my own phone number, and zip code+4 is a nightmare).
Or \ = cross = 2 over 3; // = twist = 2/4 over 1/3; / = right over left, single thread.
I like that; symbols are OK (for me), as long as they're self-evident within reason (as these obviously are), and as long as there aren't too many of them.
But I have a book... Dentelle au fuseau/dentelle du Puy (M. Fouriscot, J. Petiot, H. Jourde, M. Jourde)... It uses colour -- to show the paths of pairs/threads in some instances, as an "extra". For diagramms, it uses B&W symbols... *Two pages* of them; *55* -- ingenious but not self-explanatory -- symbols. The meaning of each is explained -- in French. My lace vocabulary of French is expanding rapidly (as is lace vocabulary in several other languages <g>) but, otherwise, I know only one word; it starts with "m", is not used in polite society (back in Poland, we "euphemised it" by saying it was "General Cambronne's word"), and I use it with abandon whenever I come accross one of the diagramms in that book...
For us dyslexics, having the sloped symbols would be really nice! We just make our threads be that way, no need to remember which is our right/left hand.
For us non-dyslexics (but memory-deficient folk) it would be nice too, for the same reasons; you just imitate what you see :) But that's good only for stitch *description*, not for stitch *representation* (as in a diagram)... For diagrams, I'd still like to see colour, if *much reduced* as to shading. Shading could be replaced with cross-hatchings and a *few* (please, OIDFA <g>) symbols/conventions...
And I truly don't believe there will ever be a universal code. [...]
Some [...] want to be lace purists--"This is the
way I was taught, this is the way lacemakers 500 years ago were taught, it
should be the way people are still taught."
500 yrs ago, lacemakers got a pricking, and that was all; no photos of the finished lace, no info on threads, no nothing. They were also professionals, who got *training*, if only in a single technique (well, 500 yrs ago, there weren't all that many techniques *to* teach <g>).
If one wanted to be a true purist (and ignore present-day realities and *possibilities*), one would assemble a school, and teach *only* by direct contact, and only plaits and, maybe, tallies... Drawing all their designs "by eye" (no easily available graph paper)... Making copies of the prickings *only* via pricking through old copies (no such thing as photocopy)... None of the *living* teachers would put up with that, if they were told to be *consistent* in their defence of "tradition"... :)
BCC has a tradition of its own; it may be only a bit over a 100 yrs old, but 100yrs is reckoned "an antique" in most cultures. One can admire an antique, one can continue to try and reproduce it as closely as possible, *when* posible... One can also *change* things, when there's a good reason to -- who of you would like to live without running water (much less without electricity and computers <g>)? My Eng.lit. prof. at the Warsaw U. was fond of deriding the Romantics' desire to "go back to nature" and their idea of the "natural man"; "natural man", he used to say, "never combs his hair. Nor does he cut it, or his nails. For bathing, he uses rain, and wears his clothes while at it".
If we went back 500 yrs, we wouldn't even *need* books (with or without colour); how many individual lacemakers could afford to own any?
Re colour blindness... All the examples given were *male*; is colour-blindness one of those things (like hemophilia, I think) which women *carry*, but only men *get*? If so, the number of lacemakers excluded because of diagrams using colour in publications (books and magazines), would be marginal; not all men are colour-blind and how many of them are likely to take up lacemaking?
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Tamara P Duvall
Lexington, Virginia, USA
Formerly of Warsaw, Poland
http://lorien.emufarm.org/~tpd/
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