I had a chance so years ago to take a workshop retreat. I thought it would be fun. The subjects offered were Binche, Lutac, Withoff and something else that I can't remember, but it was not Flanders. I looked at pictures of the four laces, and liked Binche best, so signed up for it. No one had ever told me that I should have Flanders first. It was not mentioned in the class specifications.
The first day, when the teacher found out I had no background, she looked at me very strangely, but since we were miles from town at a ski resort, she said I could try it. I did fine. No problem with reading the diagram, etc. She did have to show me what the Flanders ground stitch was since I didn't know it, but that was the only special teaching she did for me. So, if you can follow a diagram and have very good general lace skills, you should be able to do Binche without taking all those other classes first. I often wondered, 2-3 centuries ago, did the people in the area making Binche lace have to make other laces first? Or did they just learn what their mothers and neighbors were making? I will say that before I went to the retreat, I got everything I could find on Binche that was available right then, which wasn't much. There were some basic snowflake instructions in a folder so I practiced them. I used a different colored thread for every double pair of bobbins. If my colors were different at the end of the snowflake, I knew I had made an error. It was an interesting way of checking my work. Alice in Oregon -- cool and showers, with sun breaks. We had a wedding during church service today. It was very interesting. --- purple lacer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: Some would argue that > you need to master > Flanders, Paris and Valenciennes before you can even > think about Binche. > Luckily for me someone said "not necessarily!" - To unsubscribe send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] containing the line: unsubscribe lace [EMAIL PROTECTED] For help, write to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
