On Jun 23, 2007, at 12:28, Carol Adkinson wrote:
I bought an Elizabeth Burgess pattern - a round mat - very recently, and it had just one-third of the pattern on the sheet - it had to be photocopied three times, and the bits stuck together, to make the pricking. The scanning and copying was easy, but the fitting together was most definitely not, as I think the copying distorted the pricking - only very slightly, but enough to be a nuisance when putting the three peices together!
It might have been the fault of the copier/scanner, but then... it might not have been :)
In the past, when I've had problems piecing such "broken" patterns, I tried copying by hand. And found that the mis-match was buried deeper; it probably occured when the book was printed. In eiter case, the starting dots did not align properly with the beginning dots and the join had to be fudged.
Brenda Paternoster wrote:
I remember, from years ago, a photocopy machine engineer telling us that the internal settings of the machine were such that a narrow margin was allowed for - in case the original wasn't *exactly* in the right position, and that caused the copy to be not quite true, ie a square would become a rectangle. Much to the chagrin of lacemakers who struggle to fit pieces of pricking back together.
And the folk at "my Xerox place", where I used to go to get my prickings copied, said that the machine had an inbuilt error (I think I had to photocopy at 98% or something like that, to get the closest approximation to the original, though it seemed like it ought to have been 97% in one direction and 99% in the other), to prevent people from stealing copyrighted intellectual property. If you couldn't copy something *exactly*, you were supposed to be stymied. Always struck me as a piece of BS nonsense.
My first personal copier, despite its many faults (ink-jet, with ink which tended to dry out between uses; slow; expensive to use, due to the necessity of frequent changes of ink; the scanner part of it refused to "talk" to my MacOSX, etc) never distorted any prickings -- not even by a fraction of a milimeter -- in either direction. My new (since Christmas) "baby" -- a laser copier/scanner/printer -- doesn't distort either, at least not when I copy. I have not checked what a scanned and printed pricking might be like, because I've had no need to do that. It's an extra effort and I'm all against waste of energy :)
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