I haven't made a large pattern, but I tried to imagine making one. What
pillow would I use..... Has anyone tried doing one on a large bolster pillow?
It seems like that would be a practical method of working with a very large
pattern.
A large bolster would probably work quite well. I don't have a bolster pillow but I have seen a large pattern (Russian Tape) made on one and although to me it looked awkward, the lady seemed to be having no problems.
I've only ever made two largish projects in my entire lacemaking life.
The first one was a a really big collar (4" wide, and made for a deeply scooped-necked dress), and I made it on an ordinary 21" cookie (long since passed on to another lacemaker; I only kept the 24"). But it was Russian Tape (more or less; my own design, and an early one; I was still stumbling in the dark <g>), made with just 6 or 7 pairs, so it was easy to unpin and re-pin in a more comfortable position for work.
The second piece was this summer, during Ulrike Loehr's Snowflake Quilt class (Binche snowflakes and variations; essentially, Viele Gute Grunde part II). She recommended we bring a block pillow, so I hauled out my 24" square, all-blocks pillow from Kloeppelkiste. I love this pillow for its feel but don't use it all that often; it's superb for things with corners, but I don't make many things with corners. Meanwhile, the *pillow's* corners dig into my middle, if it's not positioned "just so"; I was even contemplating cutting it down, to make an octagon...
The piece I decided to make in class was just a plain hexagon (all pieces were arrangements of equilateral triangles but, depending on the arrangement, you got different final results -- both as to size and shape). One made a little one (6 triangles) first, then spiraled out for the next "round" (18) of them. And the next, if one so wished, though I didn't.
I pinned my pattern centrally, as I always do on a cookie, and cursed my way through the little hexagon, every time I had to work on a triangle which placed the pillow's corner poking through to my backbone. As it turned out, that was the easy part :)
I almost finished the original 6 during the workshop but wasn't ready to quit; my bobbins were overwound (I wound as much as I was told to, then added a bit for breakage and, naturally, didn't break any threads -- the story of my life <g>), there were still 94 tempting variations... I was having fun figuring out the flakes, had no pressing ideas for anything else... I decided to go ahead and do the second round.
And discovered -- fery fast -- that, while some of the triangles were fairly comfortable to make, some were FMK9 (a bitch), depending on whether I was working in or out. None poked me in the stomach any more, but, in some, the bobbins (36prs "basic" and 2 prs gimp) were falling off the pillow. Grumble. But I wasn't in the mood to cut the project off; I had too much effort "invested" in it, and I hadn't "milked" all the fun from those variations, either. Not to mention that a hexagon with just 3 triangles in the outer round looks like h... and has no place to finish unobtrusively... I was committed to finishing all 18 if it killed me... <g>
And then it "clicked"; the classic "oh, DUH" moment... :)
I started moving the blocks around. Not in the way I've always done (for hankies and such), but so as to always have room, *on the pillow*, for the bobbins I needed. If it meant that a part of the pricking (either to be yet covered or already worked and pins removed) was off-centre -- in a corner even -- and spilling over the pillow, so be it. As long as the most recently made part was on the pillow, with pins in it; as long as a good supply of bobbins was nicely fanned out with the pillow support to them, I was OK. So simple... :)
I realised then that my original order of blocks and spares had been un-informed (to be kind to myself <g>); I had far too many big squares and nowhere near enough of thirds and of quarter-squares -- there'd been times when I was "skating over *very* thin ice" (like, nothing at all under the pricking. Hair raising experience <g>). The matter is now being rectified, even though large projects are still, basically, not "my cup of T". But you never know... And I'm sure glad I never got around to remodelling the pillow into an octagon.
Yours, busily making a Christmas ornament for myself (*small* <g>), in snowy Lexington
----- Tamara P Duvall Lexington, Virginia, USA Formerly of Warsaw, Poland http://lorien.emufarm.org/~tpd/
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