On Dec 11, 2007, at 10:30, [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Devon) wrote:
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?
[...]
Devon
proposing a radical concept
Personally, when I was asked to judge, I concentrated on the lace, not
on the mounting, unless the mounting was so horrible, that that was all
you could see. For basically the same reasons as Devon -- time spent on
meticulous mounting is time taken away from improving your lace.
For me, there are also other reasons (apart from being cack-handed when
it comes to hand-sewing <g>). One is that, 100 or so yrs ago, most
women knew a lot more about hand sewing than most women do today. Even
if they didn't know how to make lace, they knew how to attach it
nicely. The second reason is that the fancy-stitched attachment tends
to be *permanent*; those 3- and 4-point stitches last and last and
last. Long past the time the fabric gives up the ghost. So then, if you
want to reuse the lace, you have to pick the fabric threads out, one by
one and even then still risk the ruin of the lace.
These days, if I ever make lace for something like a hankie, I tend to
hem the hankie separately (either by machine or a rolled hem by hand)
and attach the lace by overcasting (by hand). It's not as pretty, but I
can tak the lace off easily.
But this by hand vs by machine thread reminds me of something which,
several years later, I still have not resolved. I think it was in '99,
that the IOLI Convention was in Bethesda, Maryland. The competition
theme was handkerchiefs. And the first place (in the original lace
category) went to a beautiful, multicoloured piece, the lines of which
were very irregular/sinuous not only at the headside, but at the
footside as well.
"Sheer h..l to mount" I thought when I saw that piece "What colour
thread would you use? And all the cutting and hemming of that fabric
edge to fit it inside the lace.... Eeek". Apparently, the lacemaker
found the task equally daunting... So she didn't mount the lace at all
:) The "edging" was just pinned to a piece of fabric, which extended
past the outer edges of the lace. Because the lace was strongly
coloured and the fabric was white, the fabric provided the contrasting
background and the lace was visible -- not something that one could do
with white lace. But, neither was it a *handkerchief*, in the way I
understand a hankie. Yet, it got the first... And it made me wonder
just how many points other people -- who did bother to attach theirs --
lost to inexpert attachment, un-necessarily.
--
Tamara P Duvall http://t-n-lace.net/
Lexington, Virginia, USA (Formerly of Warsaw, Poland)
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