[lace] thread for Hollie Point
I've completed a Hollie Point needlelace exercise! Great, right? On to the third exercise! Except, suddenly I feel disenchanted with my thread. It's Tanne 50, a cotton thread. Should I try a different thread? I guess threads are either cotton, linen, or silk. Or any of those types right out of the question for Hollie Point, or needlelace in general? What do I look for in a thread? I'm dissatisfied with the Tanne 50 because it looks great coming off the spool but it gets really beaten up after I've been sewing with it for a while. I think that's natural? Needelace is hard on thread because the thread is constantly being pulled through the narrow previous stitch. Also, something about the motion of needelace seems to add a twist to the thread so it gets more and more kinked up as I work. Also, being a beginner I occasionally make mistakes and have to unlace, which is extra rough on the thread (of course unlacing is bad for thread in bobbin lace, too, so that's not news). I think maybe there is a natural conflict in needlelace between wanting the thread to be really long, so you are not constantly tying off old thread and starting new threads, and needing the threads to be sort of short, so that by the time you get to the end of the thread you aren't sewing with dingy pathetic shreds. So, just naturally I've been reducing my thread lengths as time has gone by, in response to the thread being so mangled by the time I get to the end. Having a shorter thread also helps with the problem of kinking. I countertwist my thread when I notice it begin to kink, but I am hindered there because, and I 've really tried, I am unable to figure out what direction I should counterturn the thread. "Clearly clockwise" I finally decide. Then a little while later "why did I think clockwise? Clearly counterclockwise". Still more later "no, clockwise was right in the first place." And on and on forever. One time I decided that for my newest piece of thread I would once and for all end the twisting problem by diligently countertwisting at almost every stitch, and I totally overdid it and the thread actually ended up falling apart in my hands. Wow, I didn't even know thread did that. OK, so I have respect for the way needlelace chews up thread. Nonetheless, I am wondering if maybe some threads stand up to the abuse better than others and Tanne 50 is not the sturdiest choice. Also, what about the final result? Do some threads give nicer final results? And what about the feel of thread as you work with it? In bobbin lace I enjoy the way different thread material feels differently as I work with it. My book mentions "Brok 160 or Egyptian Cotton 120". How do Brok and Egyptian Cotton compare with Tanne 50? What size thread should I be using anyway? Brok 160 and EC 120 are, according to my thread chart, significantly smaller than Tanne 50. It is important to me that my needelace be portable, since if I am at home I can make bobbin lace. In Hollie Point the number of stitches in a piece is fixed and the size of the piece is just whatever you end up with when you make that number of stitches. The exercise I just did was about 160 stitches wide and it is a little over 3 inches long, call it 153 stitches for three inches, 51 stitches per inch. About 8 centimeters, so 20 stitches per cm. At this size, I can make needlelace in good light but not in mediocre light. Also my stitches are just a little bit smaller than my size 26 tapestry needle. I am afraid that if I go any smaller than I would only be able to do it in excellent light, so it would no longer be portable. Also I guess I would have to find smaller needles, I guess some sort of sharp, but I could learn to deal with! that. Should I stick with threads the same size as Tanne 50 or would I find that I can after all make needlelace in good light with a smaller thread? In general I am the sort of person who likes lace to be fine. I get bored with coarse lace. It's a surprise to me to be doing this third exercise at all. In Hollie Point, the idea is that you have a simple rectangle and you completely fill it with stitches to end up with a solid, boring rectangle of knitted-looking cloth, in my case a 160 stitch by 37 row rectangle. Except! Except the rectangle isn't boring after all because as you work it you strategically occasionally leave out stitches, which causes visible holes in the cloth. You place the holes in such a way as to form a delicate picture. So Hollie Point is like counted cross stitch, except that the picture is formed not by contrasting colors of thread but by the contrast of hole and stitch. My book is "Chapter 2: Hollie Point" of Catherine Barley's "Needelace Designs and Techniques Classic and Contemporary". The entire time I was doing the first exercise, a simple diamond inside a diamond, I was dissatisfied. "If I want to do counted cross stitch",
Re: [lace] blocking silk scarf
I am so sorry, spiders. Two weeks ago I posted and said I was just about to wash and block my newly completed Torchon silk scarf. This turned out to be lies. I did finish my scarf but it has not been washed or blocked. After I took it off of the pins, I looked at it and it looked ok and all my desire to wash it just drained away from me. And I had gone to all the trouble of buying blocking mats, too! My new plan is wait until it gets dirty to wash it. This might happen relatively soon since I've been wearing it all over the place and, when taking it off, absentmindedly been tossing it into a crumpled heap. Thanks for all your insight into the matter. On the bright side, even though I didn't get to experiment with washing and blocking, I am really happy with the scarf. I'd never made a scarf before. It is model 11 with one colored pair from Brigitte Bellon's Kloppelmuster fur Schals und Tishlaufer. It is silk, bright red with the colored pair being pastel variegated. It seems to be a different length every time I try to measure it my best guess is that it is five and a half feet long, not including the fringes. When I was making the scarf I occasionally felt disappointed that it looked like a table runner instead of a scarf. I defiantly said that if Scarlett O'Hara could call a curtain a dress then I guessed I could call a table runner a scarf, but that was just whistling past the graveyard. However, now that I actually have the scarf in hand I find that I really like it. It is really neat to wrap myself up in big oversized bobbin lace. Usually bobbin lace is really tiny and I am huge, so having this really coarse lace around me is like a giant has made bobbin lace and given it to me. Like Gulliver being dressed by the Brobdingnagian giants. The Bellon scarves are different in that, instead of starting at the top of the scarf and working down vertically until you are done, you work across horizontally. You work horizontally to the end, make a U-turn around the corner, work horizontally back in the opposite direction, make another U-turn, work horizontally in the original direction, etc, until you are done. When I originally asked you all for scarf advice last October, Antje GonzAilez said that she thought this method of working made Bellon's scarves more fun to make than normal yardage. I've never made another scarf so I can't compare, but I did find Bellon's method to be lots of fun. I likes having the subgoals of "making it to the next U-turn" and alternating horizontals and U-turns broke up the tedium a bit. I did finally get tired of making the scarf (I don't think I'm really a yardage type of person) but just as I was thinking that I really had to put the scarf aside and do something else for a while, I measured the scarf and found I was done! Perfect timing! A bonus for me is that I've always fairly fine straight continuous lace and I've always really dreaded sewings. With Bellon, as you work across, making the horizontal strip, you need to sew the new strip into the previous strip as you go along. This was an intimidating prospect to me, but I thought that maybe sewing would be easier with really coarse lace. It turns out sewings are amazingly easy with really coarse lace. In fact, there was one time where I had to do some unlacing to fix an error and I actually just unmade 3 sewings to back up to my error. So the sewings were fun and I think I have a much better understanding of sewings to carry back to my point ground work. I had thought over the years that doing some exercises in coarse lace could help me with sewings, but I find coarse lace to be so boring to do that I could never bring myself to do that. With this scarf I finally had a coarse project that I really wanted to do, and enjoyed doing, and just happened to have a lot of sewings. Julie in Laurel, Maryland USA - To unsubscribe send email to majord...@arachne.com containing the line: unsubscribe lace y...@address.here. For help, write to arachne.modera...@gmail.com. Photo site: http://www.flickr.com/photos/lacemaker/sets/
[lace] blocking silk scarf
Hi all I am about to start the last repeat of a red and pink silk Torchon scarf (from Brigette Beldon's book). I bought a package of "Knitter's Pride Blocking Mats", which are like blocks of soft styrofoam. When I finish the scarf (tonight??) I plan to submerge the scarf in warm water mixed with a little Ajax dishwashing liquid, swish it around a little, and then submerge it in warm clean water and swish again. If the colors seem to be running (I don't know if that is a thing that happens) then I'll run more warm water over it until the water is clear. Then I'll roll the scarf into a towel to absorb the water so the scarf is just damp and not dripping wet. Then I am going to lay the damp scarf nice and straight on my new "blocking mat" and put pins in all the pinholes on the outer edges of the scarf (not into any of the inner pinholes). I think it would be hard to keep the scarf straight if I put the pins in consecutively so I figure I will first put in pins really far apart from each other, like a foot apart, and then fill in the middle so that the pins are half a foot apart, and then fill in again so they are 1/4 of a foot apart, and so on. Is it important to put pins in every pinhole or can I get bored and stop when I've only pinned, say, every other pinhole? Is this a good plan or is it a really awful plan and all of you out there are cringing in horror? I've never pinned a piece of lace. Until this past summer I'd never washed lace at all. This past summer and fall I've washed (as described above, except I laid the dripping wet lace on a paper towel instead of the big cloth towel I plan to use on the scarf) two very narrow cotton bucks point exercises and one small and sturdy cotton needlelace exercise (the Venetian Gros Point exercise from chapter 1 of Catherine Barley's great book) but I didn't pin either of them. I washed the bucks edgings because I wanted to practice sewing lace to cloth and I was told to always wash both the lace and cloth before attaching together, and I washed the needlelace because I'd carried it in my handbag for a long period of time and it was really dingy. The needlace was colored cotton (Madeira Tanne 50) and the colors didn't run together at all when it got wet-- the only change was that the needlelace went from being dingy and dirty looking to bright and pretty. Julie Shalack All snowed in in Laurel Maryland USA - To unsubscribe send email to majord...@arachne.com containing the line: unsubscribe lace y...@address.here. For help, write to arachne.modera...@gmail.com. Photo site: http://www.flickr.com/photos/lacemaker/sets/
[lace] Must I push down pins?
I'd like to make a lace scarf because why not? I've never made a lace scarf before. I'm using a design, design 11, from Brigitte Bellon's Kloppelmuster fur Schals und Tischlaufer. Bellon's scarves are not worked by starting at the top and working down in one long vertical strip. Instead, the scarf is worked in horizontal strips. I turn my pillow so the horizontal is oriented vertically, work the horizontal strip, turn the pillow 90 degrees, work a triangular strip that has the effect of sending all the bobbins into a U-turn, turn the pillow 90 degrees, and start working a new horizontal strip in the opposite direction from the first one. As the new horizontal strip is worked and its edge touches the edge of the old horizontal strip, the new edge is sewn into the old edge. I approach a sewing with fear and loathing and once the whole ugly ordeal is over I try to put it behind me and forget it at soon as possible. I make only continuous lace (specifically, point ground) so I only have to sew when I am making something like a handkerchief edging and endings have to be sewn into beginnings. SO I was a little worried about doing this scarf. "But", I tried to encourage myself, "this scarf is really really coarse. Maybe you hate sewings because the cursed little 15-footside-per-inch holes are so tiny. Maybe it will all be different with this project." At this point I have completed two horizontal strips, so I have made one complete column of sewings, and it is in fact all different! Hooray! The sewings are a piece of cake. Moreover, since I can actually see the twists in the thread I can finally really see why my sewing book says the sewing eats a twist and I need to put in an extra twist after the sewing. I am happy and I am hoping that all this practice sewing in coarse lace will make sewing in fine lace easier. My crotchet hook is too fine for such coarse thread, so when I sew I make sure the thread is positioned above the hook and doesn't split on the sharp point of the hook, but that it easy to do. So, having done a full column of sewings, I couldn't help put notice the large, obtrusive wall of pins on the left side of my pillow the entire time I was working the second horizontal strip. Having the left side of my pillow cut off from me unpleasantly constrained my working area. I laid a small piece of cloth over the pins so I could throw my bobbins there when I wasn't using them, and that worked fine and I had no problem with threads tangling in the pins, but when I was crossing and twisting it didn't feel natural to try to scale the bobbins over the wall of pins and onto the cloth, so the bobbins I was working with were all over to the right side. Which felt crowded. Also, the tensioning direction was wrong, so after the stitch I kept picking up bobbin pairs and pulling them all the way over to the left so that tension was in the correct direction, in particular so that cloth stich passives didn't bunch up over on the right side of the cloth trail. By the way, I am working on a flat block pillow and I work in the closed English fashion. I put a towel or something under the pillow so it is a little tilted, although honestly I have never noticed much difference between working at a slant and working totally flat. I only work continuous lace. When I first learned about bobbin lace it never even occurred to me to do anything else. Continuous lace just seemed so immediately appealing. I really love the way the bobbins all draw up out of the ground, make a motif, and then vanish back into the ground again. I like thinking of the ground as a great ocean which throws up bobbins to the surface and then sinks them down under again. I like the way that making a motif is constrained by the bobbins you have available and you have to logically organize things so the exact number of bobbins are available when you require them. Such constraint is like poetry. It is romantic. Sure, the rules get broken and extra bobbins are added to fill in the motif and a gimp occasionally is cut off instead of working across the lace to the next place it is needed, but overall there is logic in the construction. So piece lace just never looked appealing and I've never tried it. So, now, here I am, doing a piece lace sort of thing--sewing--and Iseem to remember something about pushing down pins so they don't get in the way? Is that what I really need to do to get rid of the wall of pins on my left? ALL the pins? There are so many! And then I will have to dig them all up again to remove them from the lace! Instead of pushing them all down, should I remove most of the pins when I finish the horizontal strip and just leave in a few columns of pins along the edge, pushed down? How many columns (this is torchon)? I have a pin pusher (I like to push down headside and footside pins in point ground) so it won't hurt my fingers. I think I
[lace] Multi-part prickings tricky; skeins also tricky
I'd like to make a lace scarf because why not? I've never made a lace scarf before. I'm using a design from Brigitte Bellon's Kloppelmuster fur Schals und Tischlaufer Last Saturday morning I decided to devote the weekend to prep work--making a pricking and winding bobbins. The day before I had gone to the photocopy store and made 6 photocopies of the design (at 120% size; thanks for the spiderly advice). I thought that was an excessive amount to make, but I wanted to have piles in order to make sure I didn't have to make another trip to the photocopy store. As it turned out, I ended up using all six. I barely had enough. I thought making the pricking would be easy. So I just went and cut the pricking templates from the photocopies. The templates didn't fit together. I tried again more carefully. They still didn't fit. Realizing that I apparently couldn't just sit down and start cutting, I got out a piece of paper and carefully wrote down what I was doing. This resolved the problem. However, even armed with a working planI still managed to mess up one more attempt before finally getting templates that worked. Here's what I found out when I wrote things down: for a scarf, I need a beginning pricking, an end pricking, and two middle prickings for vamping the yardage in the middle. I want the two middle prickings to be identical because that is more aesthetic and also so I don't have to decide ahead of time whether my scarf will use an even or odd number of middle repeats. It looks like the book wants me to use the same part of the design for both beginning or ending (a little hard to tell since the book is in German and I can't read German), so I just need one pricking for beginning and end both. So here is what I start with, when the prickings are all laid in order next to each other: start--middle1--middle2--end XX-- XX -- XX -- XX The "X" represent the unknown left and right edges of the prickings. Now I start cutting. I cut out the right edge of the start pricking. Call that edge A: XA -- XX -- XX -- XX Now since the start has to interlock with the middle, the left edge of the middle pricking is determined. Call B the edge that interlocks with A, and remember that the two middles are identical: XA -- BX -- BX -- XX. Now the two middles have to interlock and the left edge is B so the right edge must be A again: XA -- BA -- BA -- XX Now the ending has to interlock with the middle so it must be B: XA -- BA -- BA -- BX Ta-da! So the start and the ends have different edges. I can't use the same pricking for both start and end. Or more accurately, I can both use the same pricking for start and end and also use the same pricking for both middles. Either the middles are different or the start and ends are different. I think with some thought maybe I could have figured out how to make A=B, like maybe if I maybe the edge absolutely straight instead of wavy, and then I could have made both the middles be the same and reuse the same pricking for start and end. I'm happy enough with separate prickings for start and end. I usually use the insides of cereal boxes for prickings. I cut up the cereal box, tape the photocopy on the box, prick, remove the photocopy, and with colored pens draw in the pricking markings. However, because this is my SPECIAL scarf lace project, the first scarf I have ever attempted I went for the fancy-schmancy blue prickings. I laid the photocopy onto blue cardstock and then covered both with sticky (on the bottom) transparent bluish plastic cover, so that the photocopy was sealed onto the cardstock. I didn't put any additional markings on the prickings (the photocopy already had markings) but if I had wanted them I would have had to draw them on the photocopy before sealing with the plastic. The prickings were so big that I used up all the blue plastic I had had lying around unsused from many years ago. I'll have to remember to buy more form my bobbin lace supplier. After finally getting the prickings done (I haven't actually pricked the second middle piece with the pricker, but I don't need that to start the scarf so I can do it at my leisure) I started on bobbin winding. The scarf design has a trick to it so I only need 24 pairs of bobbins even though the scarf is three times that wide so you would expect it to need 72 pairs (much thanks to spider Antje for pointing that out to me BEFORE I started winding bobbins!). Many, many hours later I'd gone through a skein and a half and had wound 18 pairs. That night, Sunday night by now, as I put my stuff away an unexpected old fragment of memory from many years ago drifted to the surface of mind. Back then I spent a few months learning how to weave. I suddenly remembered that my how-to-weave class spent a fair amount of time teaching us not to dress a loom directly from the yarn skein. So on Monday I searched the internet and found lots of posts from knitting sites emphatically instructing that you should never knit directly from a skein (also
[lace] pricking size for scarf
I would like to make a silk scarf because why not? I've never made a scarf. I have a design and I have silk yarn. However, I don't know how much to enlarge/reduce the pricking so as to fit the yarn. I have made teeny samples of various sizes but I don't know what to look for. What? What am I looking for? The design is Model 11 from Brigitte Bellon's Kloppelmuster fur Schals und Tischlaufer. That's a book of Torchon(?) scarves and table runners. It's in German (which I don't speak) and there aren't any diagrams for how to make stitches, but the prickings are marked (for example, the cloth trails and spiders are clearly marked) and there are very clear photos of each piece. This scarf looks like just Torchon ground, cloth trails, and a few spiders thrown in. I got the book and yarn from Holly Van Sciver. She said, oh, this pricking is too small for this yarn, you will have to enlarge appropriately. I said, how do I know how big to make it? She said, make little samples with various pricking sizes. I said, what, you mean I have to go make an entire pricking and wind up all those bobbins and then start working the scarf and then stop after a short time so all that work was for nothing? She said no, not at all. She said put the photocopy directly on the pillow--no pricking-- and just work with a few bobbins. Easy-peasy. So I went home, made a bunch of photocopies of various sizes, and wound up 12 pairs of bobbins. I started at the beginning of the scarf, but the beginning of the scarf is just ground and I wanted to see how the yarn behaved in cloth stitch. I ran out of bobbins well before I got to the first cloth stitch. So I found a likely section of the design that had both ground and cloth. I made an imaginary 7 by 5 ! pin diamond. I put pins on the top left and top right sides of the diamonds and hung a single pair on each. Then I worked the inside of the diamond, which, as I said, had both ground and cloth trail. So now I have teeny diamonds of various sizes. What am I looking for? This is a scarf, so I guess I want it to be soft. Maybe lace will naturally be soft because it has lots of holes in it? Also, won't it be impractical as a scarf since won't the holes let all the cold air in so it won't keep you warm? Should I make it extra long so the wearer can wrap it around a few times to keep the cold out? Or are lace scarves only worn wrapped once, for maximum decorativeness? How long should a scarf be, anyway? I guess the tighter the lace the more stiff and study it is? So how stiff and sturdy do I want a scarf to be? Surely a really loose lace will fail to hold its stitches and be more likely to catch and distort when touching another object? But I do want it to feel nice to the touch. All the other lace I make is just edging exercises and stuff so it's not big enough that I care how it feels like in my hand. For the 100% diamond the cloth stitch was resistant--I felt like I had to really pull the threads to get them through and the threads felt rough and not-wanting-to-slide. Off the pins, the cloth stitch looks a little lumpy and the sides where the weaver bends around looks unattractive. So, fine 100% is definitely too small. 105% is better. 110% is pretty reasonable. The cloth stitch looks smooth and it was easy to work. The threads no longer feel rough and resistant. Except maybe when I am pinning the weaver. At 115% the cloth stitch starts looking like it has some space in it. Breathing room. Man, it look like dense half stitch to me but I know for a fact that I used cloth stitch. I think maybe that's due to the fact that the cloth stitch goes diagonally when I hold the diamond in the natural way, instead of going horizontal. I think I'll try a couple more sizes and see if I can get something that is definitely too big. Right now I guess I like the 115%, as it feels the softest. But the diamonds are really small. Maybe a much bigger piece of lace has qualities to it that I miss in a smaller piece, qualities like the softness and sturdiness. I wonder if I should use one twist when putting the weaver around the pin instead of two twists? Holly sold me some extra large pins, but she still seemed dubious about their size. I don't know why she is dubious; I don't know what happens if torchon pins are too small. But I wonder whether the reason the thread feels resistant going around the weaver pin is not that the pricking is small but rather that the pins are so small that it hard to fit two twists inwhen circling around the pin. I'm excited at this idea of figuring out for myself how big to make the pricking. I am not naturally adventurous, not at all, so I always use the thread specified in the book or in Holly's sizing chart, slavishly following the directions and afraid to explore for myself. I am really pleased at how quick and easy it is to just churn out several diamonds. It
[lace] Mechlin, where did the pins go?
Hi Spiders My background is Torchon and Bucks Point and now I am trying to do the first exercise in the Mechlin book Rita Thienpondt's Syllabus Mechelse Kant I. Thank you for answering my questions about terminology last week; it was very helpful and motivating. I am not having any problems with the exercise, everything is going well, but I want to check that I am not missing anything obvious. The first exercise is just a long strip of (ice) ground (CTCTCTCTT)(that's two cloth-stitch-with-a-twist and an extra twist at the end). It uses 50 pairs. Horizontally it is 9 plaits across, so 18 pairs (2 pairs per vertical line) and diagonally it is 20 pairs across *one pair per slantedt line). So it is a narrow strip. The pins are missing! There are no pins in the ground! How do I tension without pins to pull against? In cloth stitch I might make many stitches before sticking in a pin, but once I put in the pin then I tension all the stitches since the last pin. So the pins are not missing in cloth sttich in the sense that they are missing here. Here, the stitch is very heavy so it is impossible to tension after the stitch is done. All tensioning must be done at the moment the stitch is made. It is impossible to alter the stitch afterwards. Think of lace ground, a mesh, as a collection of little holes. Everything is fine at the edge pin where I start making ground but then I have a long journey (18 pairs, remember) before I reach the other edge pin. At first I tensioned too hard--the circles were small-- and when I got to the end of the journey my lace did not reach the edge pin. However, this wasn't obvious until I had done several rows. After several rows I could see the lace reaching up from the edge. So then I had to make a really ugly row of great big circles in order to realign myslef with the edge pins. Now I seem to have tensioned too loosely as my lace is overhanging the edge pins, So I guess now I will hav to make some rows of really tiny circles in order to align myself again. You might think, well, why not just look at the ground as you make it and check that the holes are the right size (since the holes can only be corrected at the moment of making because stitches can't be tensioned afterwards)? However I can't actually see any holes while I am making the ground. All I see is a tangled mess of thread. At the edges I see some holes, but the middle is just hopeless. It is not until a couple of rows later that the mess resolves itself into perfectly lovely (but mis-sized) circles. So does it sound as if everythng is going the way it should be going or am I missing something? Do I still work done the diagonal, just as in Torchon and Bucks? If I worked across instead of diagonally then there would be fewer stitches between pins. Should I be somehow be prodding the stiches with pins while I make the stitches? Right now, I tension by pulling the bobbin pairs aparte (pulling the right pair to the right and the left pair to the left simultaneously) after the first cloth-stitch-with-a-twist and again after the second cloth-stitch-with-a-twist, but I don't do anything else while making the stitches. The Mechlin book has a bunch of pictues of lace with huge swathes of ground. How do they make so much ground without any pins to tension against? One thing about this exercise is that it made me realize how much I like pins. I love pulling the threads tight against the pin. Here are the threads, messy and formless right after making the stitch...I pull the threads ...they slide across the pin...voila! Nice clean straight thread lines forming a pretty stitch. I like the way I always pull bobbins down and the pins change the direction of my force vector so that the force is applied at exactly the location and direction that is needed. I provide raw brute force and the pin cleverly turns the power into something useful. This is not interesting, it is rudimentary, but it touches on interesting subjects like levers and mechanics: the subjects of indirect manipulation of forces. Manipulating forces is a key to civilization. Archimedes was so impressed with levers that he said, Give me a lever long enough and a place to stand and I could move the world.so it is much more fun to have use pins to change vectors--subtle indirect manipulation--then to just position your hands so that the vector is in the right position to start with--boring direct manipulation. I like thinking of lace as the interaction between pins and thread. Pins are all rigidity and threads are all malleability. Take some malleabililty from the threads, so that you have beautiful interesting designs, and some rigidity from the pins, so that the lines of the design are crisp and elegant instead of loose and messy, and together you end up with lace. On the other hand, after all the thousands and thousands of pins in
[lace] Mechlin terminology
Hi Spiders I just bought a How to Make Mechlin Book. It is Rita Thienpondt's Syllabus Mechelse Kant I. It looks like fun. Right now it is fairly impenetrable, but I think I'll be fine once I assay a few exercises. To make it more fun for me, could someone explain some of the terminology instead of leaving me to fend for myself? I know nothing about Mechlin; I know Bucks Point. In Section 1, Thienpondt does not define the stitches. Linen stitch is a standard name, I assume it's cloth stitch CTC Half-stitch is a standard name, I assume it is CT Twisted stitch I assume is...is well, that's where I have a problem. I have no idea what twisted stitch is. Thienpondt does define a complicated stitch Plait of 4 bobbins(Ground stitch?) as CTCTCTCTT and the picture looks like half-stitch-colored line with two twisted-stitch-colored lines attached to it. So maybe twisted stitch is CTCTCTT? (It was good that Thienpondt was explicit about the ground stitch. I feel all revved up to start the first exercise, which is just a bunch of ground stitches.) In Section 1 Thienpondt refers to a ring pair. What is that? I think she doesn't mean the gimp. In Section 2, Thienpondt says: b Making an in- or output with a picot (see techniques). Techniques are Section 1. I looked there and saw on page 15 a detailed thread diagram of a picot; it looked just like the picot I use in Bucks Point. There were lots of twists, then an entanglement, then two twists afterward. I looked carefully at all the loops by the gimp in the photograph of the worked exercise on the first page of Section 2, but none of these loops looked like picots. They all looked to me as if the pair had just been twisted twice and a pin put under it. So where are the picots that Thienpondt referred to? Julie Baltimore MD - To unsubscribe send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] containing the line: unsubscribe lace [EMAIL PROTECTED] For help, write to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[lace-chat] Re: Mac Duff, a question
Surely my family is not the only one who says Lead on, MacDuff instead of Carry On, MacDuff. Since lead on sounds so much like lay on I always figured that the phrase came from the Shakespeare play MacBeth, even though the meaning was different. In our family, the meaning was similar to the ones that Tamara described. The person who says it is giving up responsibility. The meaning ranges from you lead and I'll follow you to well, your idea is completely hare-brained but I have nothing better to do with my time so I am going to follow along and watch you hang yourself with your own rope. Usually a person shrugs when they say lead on, MacDuff. So, for example, if you were lost in the woods, you could say,What, you think the highway is North instead of West? Well, fine, we'll do it your way. Lead on, MacDuff. Or you're bored and someone suggests going out somewhere: The Arborium Gardens? I've never heard of the place. Lead on MacDuff. Julie Baltimore MD *** Tamara said: DH will sometimes - jocularly - say: carry on, Mac Duff, when allowing someone to expound on what he considers to be an outrageous idea/proposition (have all the rope you want dear kind of thing g). It's something he says he grew up with; a phrase his parents used (and he'll be 81 later this month). To unsubscribe send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] containing the line: unsubscribe lace-chat [EMAIL PROTECTED] For help, write to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[lace] Re: failure of brownies to appear
Hi Tamara Did you remember to leave out a bowl of milk? Maybe you could try putting the bowl of milk near your lace pillow? As a sort of hint as to what the desired behavior is? And, it turns out that the pesky question - *why*, after a whole repeat which went smoothly with pairs just so, do I suddenly, on the very last pin, have one extra pair with no place to send it - has not resolved itself quietly in the 4 hrs I was gone Julie Baltimore MD - To unsubscribe send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] containing the line: unsubscribe lace [EMAIL PROTECTED] For help, write to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[lace-chat] Lace and fairy tale
Hi Spiders Some months ago I for the first time started a lace piece that had recognizable pictures instead of just abstract figures. The novelty has now worn off, but for the longest time whenever I sat down in front of my pillow I was inescapably reminded of the fairy tale of the little girl and the black cat. Remember how this fairy tale goes: The little girl's mother died and the father remarried. The stepmother did not like her but concealed her dislike. One day the stepmother gave the girl a basket of tasty food and told her to take it to the stepmother's sister, who lived in a cottage at the end of the path in the forest. The little girl arrived at the cottage, which had an evil looking rusty gate in front. She managed with effort to open and close it, the hinges squealing loudly. Then she had to duck and push her way past a massive willow tree, whose branches kept getting in her face. As soon as she got clear she realized that she was in the presence of a huge snarling dog. She ran with the dog at her heels and made it through the door of the cottage just in time. An old woman's voice from another room asked her who she was and what she wanted, and she said,It is I, Auntie, I have been sent by your sister with this basket of good things. The voice replied,Dear Niece, I am busy at the moment. Go to the next room and work on the needlework there. I will see you shortly. In the next room was an embroidey frame with a magnificently realistic almost completed design of a black cat. The little girl sat down to finish the embroidery but had barely started when to her surprise the head of the cat turned and spoke to her: Girl, I am a prisoner here. Undo the emboridery and free me! ...but be very careful not to break the thread as you unpick it. The astonished girl carefully unpicked the cat design, being very careful not to break the thread, which fell into a pile beside her. When she undid the last stitch, the thread in her hand suddenly writhed, she dropped it, the whole length of the thread shimmered, and suddenly the whole pile transformed into a living cat, the very image of the picture that had been in the embroidery. The cat washed itself, gave the girl a disdainful look, and said loftily, O foolish girl! Don;t you know that your stepmother has sent you to your death? Her sister, the old woman who rules here, is actually the evil Baba Yaga and she will shortly kill you and eat you for lunch. The girl jumped up from her seat in alarm, Thank you for this warning, o gracious Cat. How can I ever repay you? The cat said, Stupid girl! I need no thanks. But I suppose you deserve something for freeing me. There are three things that may prove useful to you: the ham sandwich in the basket, the yellow ribbon on the table over there, and the oil can under the bench over here. And here is something else that may prove most useful of all. Throw it on the ground, but don't do so until you absolutely have to. Then, with a triumphant laugh, the cat turned and leaped through the window, leaving only its laugh behind. The girl collected the sandwich, the ribbon, and the oil can. Searching the area near the embroidery stand she found-- exactly where the cat had been sitting--a beautiful and strangely carved tortoiseshell comb. She took that, too. The old woman's voice came, I am terribly sorry to be so occupied, Dearie. You won't mind waiting a few more minutes, will you? The girl, trembling with fear, replied, I am making great progess with the needlework, Auntie. Please take your time. And then she quickly ran out the door. ...and so on .. When I sat down at my lace pillow, the figures did not in fact turn and talk to to me--that would have been worrisome-- but I kept on feeling that, as with the black cat, I was trapping living things into the lace. My project starts out with a big eagle head, facing so that the beak points to the top It is continuous lace--Chantilly--so one makes it by starting at the top and working downwards, making the entire lace at once. The lacing went particularly slowly at first, since I was unfamiliar with the design and hadn't previously worked so finely, so I worked on the beak for what semed an endless amount of time. It felt just as if I had grabbed the poor bird by the nose and was holding on to it! Poor bird, I would think, it must be so hard to breathe when I am holding onto your nose like this. Poor bird, how hard it must be for you to shriek grandly with your nose being held. Poor bird, how undignified for you to be held by your nose, I am so sorry to be drawing out this indignity for so long. I felt that it gave a sigh of relief when I finally moved past its beak to the rest of its head. It may now be trapped in the lace but at least it was no longer being actively clutched by the nose. I felt that is was
[lace] pair or two singles
Hi Spiders. I thought I would take a break from the slow progress on my Chantilly fan and make a post. When adding in a pair of bobbins at the gimp in point ground lace (Chantilly, Bucks Point), should I add in a pair of bobbins or 2 single bobbins? Does it matter? A pair of bobbins is two bobbins connected together. You make a pair by taking a long piece of thread and winding half on one bobbin and half on the other bobbin. Then you hang the pair over the gimp and, presto, it's added in. A single bobbin is a bobbin wound with thread which ends in a loose thread end. You add this by attaching the loose thread end to the gimp and letting the bobbin hang. While the bobbin merrily works its way through the lace, the loose end stays with the gimp until the gimp has worked three or four stitches. Then the loose end is thrown back, later cut off close to the lace. The obvious way to attach the loose end to the gimp is to knot the loose end to the loose end of a spare bobbin--to give yourself a leash--and attach the spare bobbin to the gimp bobbin (or just remember to work them as one unit). Then throw back the spare bobbin before you reach the knot. I think it must be better to add in a pair of bobbins, since then there are no loose ends in the lace. Surely it is bad to have loose ends in the lace. Even though they've been secured by three ot four stitches, won't they tend to unravel over time and so cause the whole lace piece to fall apart? I would always add in pairs if it wasn't for the problem of winding thread. Here is the problem. Suppose you start out with a pair of bobbins with each bobbin's having a good amount of thread. This pair works through the lace for a while and eventually is thrown out and cut off. Now you come to a place where you need to add bobbins. The obvious bobbins to add are the ones that were cut off. But now your original long unbroken piece of thread has been cut in half (half is now on each bobbin) so instead of a long unbroken thread you have two threads each half the size of the original thread. So you discard one thread and share the other between the two bobbins. Now you have a pair with each bobbin's having a not-so-good amount of thread. Perhaps now the bobbins have too little thread and you'll have to, ugh, replace them when they run out of thread (that puts loose threads into the lace again!). I could just throw out lots and lots of thread and always put long pieces of thread on pairs of bobbins, so the thread problem is not unsurmountable. But it is unpleasant to constantly be throwing out thread and winding bobbins. If I add in single bobbins then there is no winding at all to be done. I just grab the bobbin and add it in. So you see that I would like the convenience of adding in bobbins as singles, but I am afraid that that is a bad idea because of all the loose ends. It's bad enough that I have dozens of loose ends from cutting off bobbins, without also having them from adding in. What is the common wisdom on this question? This is a new problem for me. I have been learning lace from Nottingham's _Technique_Of_Bobbins_Lace_Revised_Edition_ (excellent book for learning lace) and in the Bucks Point exercises that I've done so far (I've done 2/3 or so of them) only one or two pairs have ever been added in. I didn't mind adding in the bobbins as pairs when there were only one or two of them. However in my Chantilly fan (the fan from Lohr's _Hausdragon_ box of patterns), pairs are constantly being cut off and added in. A pair--if not two pairs-- is added in whenever a half stitch figure is started and cut off when the the figure ends. It got to be really burdensome, constantly endlessly rewinding bobbins do as to add them in as pairs. I got sick of it. I am almost half-way done with my fan! This is slow progress since it is the only piece of lace I work on and it's been several months. It is full of mistakes. The mistakes in the figures are particularly noticeable since a mistake in half-stitch causes a run in the stocking. I used to think, how could anybody make a mistake in half-sttich? Half-stitch mistakes are so easy to catch. Ha Ha. I got my comeuppance. Also I notice the ragged and gappy look of the borders of the figure due to putting pins in the worng pinholes or maybe pricking the holes badly. Less noticeable is the fact that I just can't seem to fix in my mind how many twists to use in footside and so just twist randomly. Fortunately, it turns out that I don't care about the mistakes. No, I look at the lace, my heart lifts up, and I think it is beautiful. Just as flower can be beautiful without being perfect. However, I am really worried that my lace will fall apart because of all the loose ends. I am constantly cutting off bobbins and I don't know if I secure the ends well enough before I throw them back and cut off close to the
[lace] Enthusiasm about Lohr design
-- - In a message dated 8/19/2004 3:33:08 AM Eastern Daylight Time, Tamara Duvall writes: she's been tackling - for several months and unfrustrated - a Chantilly fan, then she must have accumulated plenty of good judgment (lace-wise) in her tool kit already. One isn't able to continue with a project of that magnitude, unless one's quite experienced. It was time for her to do as she liked, whatever the diagram said... -- - Tamara mentions above my being unfrustrated by a project. This has made me think about how much fun my current project is. It has got the most wonderful easy-to-follow diagram. My current project is the black Chantilly fan from Ulrike Lohr's box of patterns Hausdragon. In basic concept and in most of the details, this is a very simple piece: it is just large blocky half-stitch figures surrounded by ground. Some honeycomb thrown in. It's good that most of the piece is simple because that allows my mind to really focus on the complicated part: the boundary where half-stitch meets ground. This is orders of magnitude more complicated then I've dealt with before. The half-stitch weavers do the most amazing things. Sometimes the weaver changes into a passive and a new weaver take over. It does this at places where the figure forms an L-shape--I'd seen that before--but also at various places where the weaver is running along the top or bottom of the figure. Sometimes it seems as if the weaver had tried to make it all the way across the figure but just got tired and dropped into being a passive. Sometimes the weaver, having gone through many passives, stops and makes a stitch--apparently gasping for breath--and the plunges forward again instead of bouncing back in the direction it came from. There are lots of 'J' shaped figures where two separate weavers meet and then some decision has to be made about which weaver drops out and which keeps on. At the beginning of each figure, some random number of pairs are added in. Why? Clearly it's to increase the density of the half-stitch so that it is more aesthetically pleasing, but how does Lohr figure out exactly how many pairs to add? She could have made all the figures many times, experimenting with different numbers of passives (this would be appropriate behavior on the part of a beginner), but surely it is more likely that she is using some general rules of thumb that she has devised over the years or which are standard to Chantilly. I wonder what they are? I wonder if there is some sort of ratio of half-stitch density to ground density that she is trying to achieve. I've almost finished the first fifth of the fan, whis is a bird head and neck. The neck has fins sticking out of it. When I first looked at them, I thought that all the fins were exactly the same except for each one's being a little bigger than the one above it. The diagrams reveal, however, that each fin is actually tilted at a slightly different angle, which causes each fin to have a different weaver pattern. It amused me that these fins, which looked identical by eye, turned out to be so diferent by execution. Now I'm approaching the wide bottom of the neck and the weaver seems about to go into another one of those I'm too tired to make it all the way across, so I'm going to be constantly stopping and making stitches. Oops, this message got too long. I could go on--the interesting behavior of the honeycomb column that hugs headside, having extra pairs travel with the gimp instead of cutting them off, half-stitch going at twice the speed of ground-- but I'll cut it off. The point is, I am really impressed with how easy Ulrike Lohr has made this. Here she is, doing just amazing stuff, and yet it's been completely easy to do. I have not been at all frustrated. That's the mark of a really well-designed thing: it should seem really easy and obvious. The weaver is complicated because Bucks Point is based on a grid and the figures here are not grid-shaped (ie, they aren't diamonds). To an advanced lacer this might all seem blindingly simple and dull, but, to someone with no experience in floral Bucks Point, this project is like a virtuoso demonstration of ways to gracefully pull irregular shapes out of the ground. Being grid-based does not mean that you have to restrict the shapes of your figures. However, it's for intermediate Bucks Pointers, not beginners. It's quite fine. She assumes that you know how to add in and take out pairs. She doesn't give gimp diagrams, which is ok since the gimp is easy, but so far I've run into two sections that were impossible to do because of the gimp (lacking guidance, I used gimp loops). She doesn't explain what
[lace] completed favor re Ulriker Lohr's Hausdragon
Thank you Spiders for your overwhelming and prompt reply to my request for copies of two pages from Ulrike Lohr's Hausdragon box of patterns. An important request to me because I am now deep in the middle of making the pattern and I think the pages will be helpful. It turns out that I was wrong to ask for a photocopy; I was not being up-to-date with modern technology. The modern way to do it is to scan the pages into the computer and email the scanned picture. This had completely failed to occur to me. I suspect that the scanned image might not be as clear as a photocopy (because of the quaility of my printer) but the pictures looked quite clear to me and now I have the additional option of looking at them on my computer, which blows them up and lets me see every detail. So it was a really good idea. The pictures turned out to be even more enlightening than I had hoped. It turned out that my missing back page of the pattern booklet contained blow-ups of the completed lace. So it is now clear that the figures in the pattern are in fact half-stitch and that the gimp is very thick. Some Spiders took the time to say a few things in response to my request for people to say things about what Chantilly is like, and I really appreciated that. I forgot to mention in my previous post that the pattern is a lot of fun. I have been having a great time with it. Apparently a good pattern for an intermediate Bucks Pointer interested in fine lace. Julie, Baltimore MD - To unsubscribe send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] containing the line: unsubscribe lace [EMAIL PROTECTED] For help, write to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[lace] A favor re Ulrike Lohr's Hausdragon
I have a favor to ask. Could some obliging American spider who has a copy of Ulrike Lohr's Hausdragon box of patterns go photocopy the first page of pattern #12, a black fan with 2 bird heads and two dog-like heads, and mail it to me? Email me for my address. I can pay, although I'm thinking it will only put you out about 60 cents. The favor is the inconvenience of doing this. The last page of the pattern booklet would also be nice, although not as important. That's the important point of the post. Now here's just some random lace babble: I decided a few months back to try to make this pattern. I therefore went to my local Office Depot to make several photocopies of the pricking. Lamentably, my original copy of the pricking somehow got lost in the process. So I have the pricking--the photocopies of it--but I don't have the stuff that was on the back of the page that had the pricking. The stuff on the back was the first and last page of the pattern booklet. The first page of the booklet has a picture of the completed fan. I think I would like to have that. The last page in the entire box of patterns also has a picture of the fan, but that picture is too small to make out details. I've been working on the fan for a few months now. Today I was looking at what I've done so far and I thought, boy, that gimp sure is thick. Is it really supposed to be that thick? I wonder if I've got it right. Maybe a good picture of the completed results would clear this up. I think I'm using the right threads, although I can't doublecheck since the names of the threads are on the first page of the pattern booklet. My thread is Van Sciver's Danish Silk 250 3-ply Chantilly Silk unboiled which, bizarrely, comes in a film canister. This thread seems to fit the pattern reasonable well. My gimp is Piper's Silk 6-fold 140/2 spun silk. This is the thread that seems really thick. I use it just the way it comes off the spool. I've wondered if, instead of using all 6 folds, I was supposed to separate the folds and only use 1 or 2 or 3 of them instead of all 6. Against this idea is a gimp diagram (although it is for the coarser motif and not the fan) which shows the gimp thread forking into 2 pieces, with a 3 written next to it. This implies that the original gimp used all 6 folds and now was being separated into 2 pieces of 3 folds each. The other thing that bothers me is that I somehow got the idea that all the figures were supposed to be done in half-stitch. So I've been doing them that way. They've been easy to make since Ulrike Lohr provides an extremely clear and comprehensive working diagram. However, the working diagram clearly shows cloth stitch, not half-stitch. The passives all go down vertically, as with cloth stitch, not slanted, as with half-stitch. Now, one might think that if the working diagram shows cloth stitch then the question is definitely answered. Ha, no. Each line in the diagram represents a pair of bobbins, not a single bobbin. This is important, since the diagram would be unreadably cluttered if each bobbin got its own line. If each line represent a pair of bobbins then what is the best way to illustrate half-stitch, a stitch which splits the pairs? It seems to me that the best way, the clearest and easiest-to-follow way, would be to make half-stitch use the same working diagram as cloth stitch. So I feel fairly sure that I am right to be working in half-stitch, but maybe the picture would clear it up. I'm not sure that it will, since the figures are so dense that they might come out just as a solid black patch in the picture. I said I somehow got the idea that the figures should be in half-stitch. More specifically, I've been told that Chantilly lace is exactly the same as Bucks Point with the following characteristics: 1) uses black thread, 2) footside sometimes has twists, 3) headside often has so many threads in the reservoir that threads are bundled instead of being woven through individually, 4) kat stitch used, 5) beautiful scrolling flower patterns, and 6) solid figures always done in half-stitch. This pattern has characteristics 1,2, and 3 but does not have 4 or 5. Therefore, I voted that this was Chantilly Lace and all figures should be half-stitch. Speaking of half-stitch, here is a question. Do I actually need to make all the figures in half-stitch? Why can't I make some of the figures in half-stitch and some of them in cloth stitch? Or for that matter, all the figures in cloth stitch? The easy answer to this is that of course I can do anything I want. That's not exactly what I mean. I want to know what people's experiences are. Why is Chantilly done completely in half-stitch? Does something bad happen when you throw in cloth stitch? Is it more pleasing aesthetically to make all figures the same way? Is half-stitch more sturdy or something than cloth
[lace] pins
I am working on a Chantilly fan and I am thinking about pins. None of my
lace books talk about this subject.
I have three boxes of pins:
38 x .40 mm long and thin
30 x .50 mm -- my usual --
17 x .45 mm short and thin
Recall that Chantilly is a you can never have too many bobbins sort of
lace.
This particular piece uses about 85 pairs and is I guess is about 7 footside
per cm
{17 footside per in). Since previously my maximum was 50 pairs and I worked
at 14 ft/inch, you see that I am being ambitious. Also, I do not actually
know how
to make Chantilly, so I am pretending it is Bucks Point.
This piece is very simple and consists mainly of large blocky half-stitch
figures
and ground.
Method might be relevant, so I say that I am using a big octogonal block
pillow
(9 blocks, corner blocks are triangles, blocks move in all directions). It
is 23 inches
wide. This is my main pillow; almost all my lace exercises have been done on
it,
from the very beginning up until now. The bobbins, all spangled Midlands,
lie flat
on my pillow while I work( ie hands-down). I hate it when the ends of the
bobbins
dangle off the end of the pillow. I always pre-prick.
Since I can only actually work with 10-15 pairs of bobbins at a time and
Bucks
Point usually uses more than that, I need a way to get rid of all those extra
bobbins. I use spring stitch holders, which are thin plastic rods with
stretchy
metal closures. They hold about 9 pairs, 10 if I push it. All my unused
bobbins
are bound in holders and thrown over to the left and right top sides of the
pillow, out
of the way of my working area. When I started I used holders even when I only
had about 15 total pairs since it is so nice to really focus on the
particular motif
I'm working on, secure in the knowledge that the unused bobbins can't possibly
become disarranged. Besides, they need to go in holders anyway when I finish
my session and put the pillow down.
Preparing for my new Chantilly project, I became worried that my usual pins
were too thick. The holes in the pricking are so close together! Surely
they are
about as close as the diameter of a pin. So I decided to try smaller pins.
I bought
the short and thin box and started the lace.
The short and thin pins didn't last more than two rows of lace. They were
horrible,
absolutely horrible to use. The threads kept on looping over the tops of the
pins and
becoming disarranged. After two painstakingly tedious rows I gave up and
went to
my usual pins. It was such a relief to no longer have to intensely
concentrate on my
threads' not hopping and to just zip quickly along, lacing away.
So I decided that maybe short pins are bad for Chantilly/Bucks Point. Maybe
when you have any type of lace that uses lots of bobbins which need to be
thrown
back and stacked, then short pins are bad because the threads of the
thrown-back
bobbins naturally rise up a little and so loop over short pins. Could this
be true?
So I bought a box(actually, tube) of the long and thin pins. When I got
them I
was disappointed becuase there weren't very many of them (about 150) and they
were so thin that they hurt my fingers when I pushed them in.
I contemplated my pricking more carefully. It seemed to me that in fact
my usual
pins could be used in the ground (17 ftsd/in, remember), although it does
make for a
particularly impenetrable pin thicket--no possible way of spotting mistakes
until they
get out of the thicket. The problem was the half-stitch figures, which in
many places
were almost twice as dense as the ground (ie two half-stitch pins for every
ground
stitch that goes in and out). So I decided to use the long and thin pins for
the figures
and my usual pins for the ground. That way my fingers got a bit of rest from
pushing
the thin pins and I wouldn't use very many thin pins at a time so I wouldn't
run out.
What made this idea particularly feasible is that the difference in the
lengths of the
pins meant I could easily distinguish between the two types when I was
reaching into
the thicket for a new pin.
So, just as I finished off the starting rows of the fan and approached my
very first
figure, I switched to the ground-usual, figure-thin method.
Now it is several weeks later and everything has worked out well. The only
problem
is that I find that the long and thin pins bend. I bet that about a third of
them are
severely bent! I've been using my usual pins for years and the most heavily
used
ones have only a mild bend. These new pins have gotten all beat up after
just a few
pushes!
I think a lot of the bending is due to my not placing the pins accurately
and so
sometimes not being centered in my pre-pricked pricking holes. Also, because
the
holes are so very close together and hard to see, there are times when I miss
the prepricked holes completely and force the pin thropugh the pricking.
Regardless,
[lace] Re: pricking too big
A couple of weeks ago I sent a post saying that I had a point ground (Bucks Point, Chantilly, whatever) pattern that was too big to fit on one piece of pricking. I was delayed in starting this project, but now here is a follow-up post. You spiders were great! Your replies were just what I needed. I was so worried about this problem. I think I might have been excessively worried because I envisioned spending weeks on this project, finally getting to the half-way point, and then finding out that, because I'd done the pricking joining wrong, the whole thing was hopeless and would have to be scrapped. Or maybe I would spend weeks and weeks and actually finish the whole thing and then find that there was a hideously visible distortion where the prickings joined. Anyway, I really wanted some advice on this problem. Spiders were negative about the idea of overlapping prickings. Top suggestions were: 1) Get a bigger piece of card so that pattern fits on one pricking 2) Make two pricking pieces that fit snugly next to one another (abut each other) 3) Make two prickings and a flimsy paper bridge to connect them 4) Make two pricking pieces that overlap. When the time comes, move the lace from one piece to the other. I went with suggestion (2), prickings that abut each other. Having decided to cut my pattern in half, the next question is: Where do I cut it? 3 choices come to mind: 1) cut across the ground 2) cut across a figure 3) cut along a boundary, ie along a gimp line I decided to cut along a gimp line, since hiding problems in the gimp seemed like a very Bucks Point-ish thing to do. However, I am curious about the idea of cutting across the ground. Would that cause a line of distortion to appear in my ground? Well, of course the answer is no, it wouldn't, since I am not the world's greated pricker so my lines aren't straight at the best of times. I mean_theoretically_ would it cause a distortion? Tamara didn't seem to think so in her post. To make my pricking, I cut photocopies of the pricking so that I had two overlapping pieces. I glued them to the card. I cut one piece mostly along a gimp line. I put this piece over the second piece and traced in a sharp pencil the place where the cut did not follow the gimp. Then I cut the second piece. In both cases I first cut sloppily with big scissors and then used little scissors to snip the card right up to the line. Then I covered both pieces of card with contact paper and cut the contact paper off at the edges I'd made ( Somehow something has gone wrong here...). Then I pricked an inch or at the edges since I was afraid that pricking wouldn't work when the pinholes were right at the edge of the pricking. Everything went fine. However, I wonder if next time I might try pricking an inch or so of the soon-to-be-edges before I cut. No, wait, that wouldn't work because the contact paper wasn't placed yet. Maybe I could put the contact paper on before I cut, except I don't know if I can draw pencil lines on contact paper. Anyway, everything seems to be fine and the two pieces fit snugly against each other. I am delighted. I was so anxious and now it's turned out not to be hard at all. Some people asked what my project was. It is a black fan, pattern #12 from Ulrike Lohr's Hausdrachen box of patterns. It is narrow but a bit long, slightly too long to fit on a standard letter-sized card (it would have fit on A5). It is good that it is narrow, since as it is it uses 80 pairs of bobbins, which is twice what I am used to (my maxumum amount so far was 50 pairs). I am excited to try this because, except for a pretty little Torchon handkerchief last fall, I have never made lace that was not an exercise from my lace book. I wanted to do something different because I want to take a break from abstract designs. I like this fan because: it has recognizable pictures, it is Bucks Point (the only laces I know how to make are Torchon and Bucks Point), the design is simple (it's just lots of ground with some big half-stitch figures), and it is fine. As simple as the pattern is, I see as I look at the working diagrams that there are all sorts of things going on that I don't understand. So I expect I'll make all sorts of mistakes and end up with something that does not look like the picture in the booklet. So what if I do? At this point I've made enough lace exercises know that I will love the result anyway. Logically, the right time for me to make a follow-up post would have been after I finished the project and found out whether the abutting prickings had actually worked, but, geez, that seems awfully far in the future, so now is the time instead. Julie Baltimore MD - To
[lace] [lace} pricking too big
I want to make a piece of Point Ground (Bucks Point, Chantilly, whatever) but the pricking is too big to fit on one piece of cardstock. What should I do? Be very specific. It seems to me that I've heard people talk about putting a pricking on two pieces that fit together, but I don't see how to do that. The holes are so close together that holes would fall into the gap in the best case. Is it really possible to do this with a type of lace with so many holes so close together? If I use two overlapping pieces, then what is the best way to make sure the overlap line up? I was thinking that I could start the pricking on one peice and then, as I approach the end of the piece, put the other piece underneath so that both pieces are pricked simultaneously. Maybe I can just find a really huge piece of cardstock somewhere. Julie Baltimore MD - To unsubscribe send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] containing the line: unsubscribe lace [EMAIL PROTECTED] For help, write to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[lace] Re: wide floral Bucks Point
And my lace content: I'm struggling to finish pricking a wide floral Bucks handkerchief edging - I'm coming down the fourth side now. It'll be a relief to start working it, after all this pricking! Ruth Budge (Sydney, Australia) I wish I could make floral Bucks. I've been ages working very slowly through my how-to-make-Bucks book. What does your edging look like? How wide is it? How many bobbins does it use (it's exciting to use lots of bobbins; the most I've ever used was 50 pairs)? Did you get it from a book? What size thread and how many holes per inch? I'd like to aim for making Bucks at the standard size but it is not clear to me what the standard size is. My books don't go into that. I'm pretty sure the size at which I now work, using Egyptian Cotton 80/2, is too big. Should I be aiming for cotton 100/2? 120/2? I don't know what my goal should be. Julie Baltimore MD - To unsubscribe send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] containing the line: unsubscribe lace [EMAIL PROTECTED] For help, write to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
