Clay speaks of doing laborious hand mounting only of things to be judged. Speaking from the perspective of a person who has been called in to judge lace on occasion, I find the hand-finishing issue troubling. Some pieces are very beautifully hand finished, representing a huge amount of time spent on that aspect. These pieces don't always have the best lace on them. Sometimes there is a piece that has been nicely machine finished, or even not so nicely finished, but is a much better piece of lace. What is a judge to do? How much credit should be accorded on finishing? Even on a point system divided between different aspects, a nicely hand finished piece picks up 10 points over one that is not. But my emerging feeling is that, since judging impacts the development of the craft, I would like to encourage more and better lacemaking, not laborious French sewing. I almost see spending a lot of time on attaching a piece of lace to a piece of fabric as something that poses an obstacle to the greater goal, if we are to survive as a craft, of making more and better lace. At what point does the lace judge say, "this is the 21st century" and what would have been extremely important in the mid 19th is becoming irrelevant? Frankly, I am beginning to notice that most of the things I was raised to believe are important are now irrelevant. Devon proposing a radical concept
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