On Tuesday, November 23, 2004, at 11:27 AM, Andrea Lamble wrote:
couple of dainty antique parasols, with heavily rotted/damaged silk covers, but with perfect working frames. I am now in the process of removing the old fabric and making templates to recover the frames in new silk. My plan is to make a lace outer for each of them (eventually) and can't decide whether to try and design my own patterns from scratch or base them on an existing motifs?
I can't help you with full size parasols, but I did make lace for a 1/12th scale one. When I was in Australia, I found a parasol frame in a miniature shop in a suburb of Sydney. From the tip to the end of the handle it is only 7cm (2 3/4") and it works - actually goes up and down. There was no covering for the ribs and I decided not to cover them with silk (so I can't help you with that) because I wanted people to see the marvelous construction of the parasol. For the lace, I found a pricking for a circular small mat, which was just the right size. I cut a triangle out of the pricking - from the centre to one edge - so that when the 2 edges were joined, the circumference would be the right size, and the circle would not lie flat. Making the lace was straight forward, but joining the 2 edges was very difficult. I had to unpin the edge that I started with and move it over to the ending edge - very carefully because you don't want it to lie flat. Then I joined the two. It took me 5 hours to make the join and it's only about 5cm long! I would imagine that making lace for a full sized parasol would be similar - just 12 times bigger!
Margot Walker in Halifax on the east coast of Canada
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