[lace] Before BL

[Alan Sheila Brown]

My apologies to one and all.  The unusual sight of sun and flowere on 
our wild strawberry plant made me forget to say where we lived.
It's sunny Sawbridgeworth. About 30 miles each way to London and 
Cambridge. 10 miles from Stansted(London) airport but unfortunately 
under the flight paths.

Sheila Brown

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[lace] Before BL, and Arachne notes

[Alice Howell]

A variety of needle skills came before I met up with bobbin lace.  I learned 
embroidery and crochet before age 10, and continued with knitting, crewel, 
needlepoint, counted cross stitch, and various freemotion machine skills.  I 
was about age 50 when I saw a lady making BL at a festival.  Then I saw a 
listing for a class at our local fabric store and that started the whole 
adventure in 1993.  

Three years later, May 1996, my husband set up a computer for me and made me 
sit down and 'type something' in the search.  I typed 'bobbin lace' and found 
Arachne -- just after its first anniversary.  There were 300 members at that 
time.  A year later someone suggested that Arachne needed to have a conference 
and the kind members in Nottingham, England, volunteered if we would come to 
Nottingham University.  Thus Arachne was the reason I ventured across the pond 
the first time.  It was a lovely week.  (This year lacemaking takes me again to 
Europe... to the OIDFA Congress.)

Arachne also opened my eyes to the wide variety of laces in the world, and the 
many different ways some stitches can be done.  It has brought me many new 
friends whom I would otherwise never known.  I thank Liz for her generousity in 
starting and maintaining this group even though she no longer has time to 
participate regularly.

Alice in Oregon -- where we had sunshine, rain and hail today

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[lace] Before BL

[Tamara P Duvall]

On Apr 19, 2008, at 8:42, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

The first time I met Tamara Duvall, (about two months after I started 
making lace) I was delighted to learn that she had also done miniature 
work BL (Before Lace).


Actually...  I had gone through a lot of textile-related handcrafts - 
in normal size and scale -- before I met Clay; teaching English as a 
foreign language -- the job I was trained to do -- was not an option in 
our little town :)


I used to make all of my own clothes as well as most of my son's and 
some of my stepdaughter's and husband's. *That* was probably genetic 
inheritance from my maternal side; my Mother's father was a tailor by 
profession and she had been apprenticed to a dressmaker as a child, 
before ending up in a textile factory as a teenager.


But I also knitted (learnt from my Mother), crocheted (learnt at a 
party, where everyone -- but my hostess and I -- was playing bridge), 
had a brief love affair with needlepoint and counted cross-stitch, had 
stab at embroidery (and was really bad at it), at quilting and at 
rug-knotting (various methods). By the time Clay and I met, I didn't 
even mention all of those other dead-end roads I had taken in distant 
past :) I had scaled down the lot -- to 1:12 (miniature) size, because 
I was bored. And I dropped even that, when I discovered BOBBIN LACE 
(oooh!)...



I'll be curious to hear what others do in addition to their lacemaking!


How y'all find the time *to* do anything else is beyond me; somehow, 
there never seems to be enough time to do everything I want to do, even 
when I concentrate on just this one little corner of the Textile 
Kingdom... Of course, I suppose I could stop reading the newspapers and 
my lefty blogs and make time that way, but since I have an obsessive 
personality anyway, focusing on just one thing (lace) might not be very 
healthy for me :)

--
Tamara P Duvallhttp://t-n-lace.net/
Lexington, Virginia, USA (Formerly of Warsaw, Poland)

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