As well as taking out the pin it helps you not have the central 'volcano' (as someone else described it!) if you spread the pairs well to the sides as you pull up the first half of the spider. This gives them room to lie flat. If you pull them all towards you then you are encouraging bunching.
As you pull up this first half, do it in stages. I always say to students that "It's supposed to look a mess when you first put the pin in" :-) Pull each thread gently to not quite as tight as it wants to be, then work across again, tensioning them properly. The reason for this is that is you pull the first few as tight as they'll go you then have more difficulty and stress on the thread to tension the other threads through the tight ones. The bigger the spider, the more important I have found this. Before you start the second half, check that all the legs are properly twisted like a rope, not with one thread straight and the other wound around it - another reason for tensioning in stages. Work the second half of the body and pick up into the ground. Again as someone else said, join in all the legs before you go off to do other things. If one side is ground and the other side the legs are going into cloth stitch, do the ground side first as the cloth stitch holds them really tightly and this is one reason for the body being lop sided. Bigger than three leg spiders tend to stay more even if you pick up a couple of legs on one side, then a couple on the other, rather than all the way down one side first. BTW, also with big spiders you are almost certainly going to need a different number of twists on the legs. The normal three twists on the first leg or two, then perhaps four for a leg or two then maybe five or even six for a really big one. If you look at the oval body shape in a square frame you can see why; the side legs are always longer than the top ones and you need to twist so the legs all look the same 'ply'. Just don't go made and overtwist as you don't want it to end up twisting the lace once the pins are out. Be prepared to experiment and undo on the first one, then write it all down and keep the note with the lace. If you have a lot of problems with lopsided bodies, analyse what you are doing. Is it balanced at the half way stage? If not see the first paragraph and tension out until it is. Take the pin out and spread them back out and start again if need be. Is it always lopsided the same way? Do you always pick up the legs the same side first? If it's the first but not the second then you are perhaps much stronger handed one side (and not necessarily your dominant side, I think sometimes the weaker hand over-compensates); if this is the case then be consciously much more subtle when you are picking up the legs, don't tension them to their final position until they are all picked up into their ground stitch and then do it by stages. If it's yes to both of the above, often all that is needed is for you to remember to pick up the other side first; the strangeness of feel this makes you much more aware of what you are doing. Finally don't forget all the different spiders that there are; any cloth stitch spider can be replaced with a half stitch one, and that eliminates the problems of volcanoes and lopsidedness. Worked exactly the same as a normal spider except using half stitch! Another very pretty replacement for a two legged spider is the star - twist each leg once and counting the pairs as 1,2,3 and 4 from the left, cross the centre thread (L over R!) of pairs 1 and 2, and the centre thread of pairs 3 and 4. Cloth stitch pair two through 3 and 4, then pair 1 through pairs 2 (pin in the centre) and 3 (ie work the first half of a normal spider). Finally half stitch pairs 1 and 2, and 3 and 4. MUCH easier to work that write, so long as you cope with crossing the middle threads - but that's just the first movement of a cloth stitch. Again, can't go lopsided or bunch up. There are lots of variations of spiders with holes and haloes and you can combine half and cloth stitch in the same spider, and you can work spider grounds with or without other grounds between them. So experiment and make your lace original, even if you are using someone else's design. Jacquie in Lincolnshire, where with all the rain we are having Incey Wincey Spider will have been washed will have been washed out of the spout many times today. - To unsubscribe send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] containing the line: unsubscribe lace [EMAIL PROTECTED] For help, write to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
