I must be nearing the 500 mark with the wire pieces
I have designed incorporating lots of leaves. I am also finding the
lacemakers who have made tallies (leaves) in fiber easily adjust to the nuances of wire
and can relax a bit when making the wire tallies/leaves.
Not me! <g> Though, quite accidentaly (wound enough wire for a project and then discovered the idea wouldn't work), I found myself practicing wire tallies (plain-vanilla, leaf-shaped ones only, so far) all afternoon, to avoid wasting what I'd wound. And they're getting *somewhat* better, though a long way from making me happy (but, afterall, I've only done 10 so far <g>). Sometimes, I get the rhythm for as much as 6-8 back-and-forth passes of the worker, but then lose it again. Decreasing is *always* a pain, while increasing only half of the time. And, only the last one began to *even approach* the density I like to see in my tallies; all the earlier ones are almost "see through". I have a (very <g>) "long row to hoe", before I get to where I want to be...
Then, for a bit of fun, I demonstrate making the leaf and in the middle of
the leaf process, I turn my pillow upside down.
Those of you who're planning to go to this year's IOLI Convention to learn wire lacework, ought to know now what to expect <g> Dianne's right: it's not as much of a disaster as it would have been in thread. Since March 6 (first day of class with Lenka) I've been learning *a lot* about the differences between thread and wire lace-work, and that's definitely one of the advantages of working with wire (another is perfect 2-thread picots. Not a single "rabbit ear" among them <g>)
In class, I used my own bobbins and my own pins, but borrowed everything else from my hostess (Paula). At the end of the second day, I was about two-thirds/three fourths done with my second Paisley... I unpinned it, bought a cover cloth from the Museum, bundled the 5.5 prs of bobbins and the pricking in it, and tossed it into my carry-on luggage, where it stayed for the next 5 days (and not very peacefully, either, as I had other "extremely valuable" things in there, which needed to be dug up every once in a while). When I was ready to re-acquaint myself with the Paisley, I plopped the whole on my pillow, pinned the pricking, re-pinned the Paisley in a few "strategic" places, unscrambled the bobbins so they were ready to work... All in about 15 minutes... *Unthinkable* with thread :)
I know that leaves and tallies in fiber are fiddley at best. One doesn't dare stop in the middle of a leaf or tally.
Mmm... That's what we're *told* :) That's what I read in the book I was teaching myself from... "Don't answer the phone, even if you know it's Queen Elizabeth calling. Don't go to the bathroom, even if your bladder is about to burst. Ignore the door, even if you see a masked individual take a spanner to its window. *Finish your tally, first and foremost*"
Nonsense.
While I *cannot* turn my pillow upside down with a (thread) tally in progress (or in fact, prefer not to with *any* thread lace in progress) and get away with it, I *can, too,* leave a thread tally mid way, and go see to whatever needs seeing to.
*All* you have to do is suspend your worker thread on one of the pins above the tally, while letting the 3 passive threads hang down, and the tally will keep its shape. It is best to interrupt the tally-weaving *before* dealing with the outer passive threads (on either side of the central one), but even that's not absolutely necessary (though the time needed to move the worker over or under one thread is negligible, and might be worth the effort). The worker thread, being anchored upwards, will hold the completed passes in place. The position of the passive threads is not permanently fixed until the tally is finished (in case of square tallies, not until the worker -- now moving down again, and more vulnerable -- has been worked into the next element for a bit); you spread the bobbins farther apart or push them closer together -- as/if needed, when you come back to your pillow. Simple.
It's worked for me -- unfallibly -- ever since I'd first discovered it, prompted by a phone call (*not* from Queen Elizabeth, as it turned out, but how was I to know? <g>). And I've been extremely gratified to hear that it's also worked for David Downunder/Collyer (who risked giving it a try after my original posting).
Wire will stay where it is put and the integrity of the leaf is not lost when the bobbins are dropped or the pillow upended.
It *may*. *For you*... So far, it hasn't for me <g>
Wire "thread" doesn't "mesh" with its preceding "pass" (unlike linen, or even 2-ply cotton), so there's nothing to hold it in place, except the bend. And not all wire is equally soft/pliable; the harder the wire, the more likely it is to hold a bend in place forever (advantages and disadvantages, like always). The wire Lenka gave us was soft; lovely to work with, but the tally's worker thread is apt to slip down *almost* as much as if it were a thread, and is a lot harder to push back up. So far, I prefer to hang it out of harm's way, above the start of the tally, if I have to stop midway.
----- Tamara P Duvall Lexington, Virginia, USA Formerly of Warsaw, Poland http://lorien.emufarm.org/~tpd/
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