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Crafty
What to do about my lacemaking? I keep vacillating between bringing it to Edinburgh or bringing cross-stitch instead. Lace is more interesting, but less portable. Cross-stitch uses colours (which pleases me) but can be repetitive. With cross-stitch I could make quick cards for people - but I could do that with lace too, if I choose my design carefully. Several of the people at the lace class I used to go to made their own Christmas cards - photograph the lace against a coloured background, and print; they were very effective, unusual and personal.
The main impediment to getting on with lace though, is the Previous Project Of Doom. Started when I was in the class, it is two figures dancing. The whole class was making designs of dancers and musicians to go on a tea towel we'd sell for charity. (Again, you photograph the lace against a coloured background and print onto linen - we do not make teatowels from lace!) Mine got rather complicated, too many arms and legs and corners, and I have [counts] 24 pairs of bobbins in play. This is a lot to manage (previously I've used 6-12 pairs); it is not enough to continue now I've reached another elbow; and it is all the bobbins I have.
[EDIT: as well as the 24 pairs of bobbins, I've found 7 pairs of orphaned threads which ought to have bobbins attached but I took them off because I needed them elsewhere. Aie!]
It is far too late (years) to complete it for the group's teatowel, and I feel bad about that. I'd never know until a couple of weeks into the class term whether it would clash with a student's lecture. The class did not permit casual weekly attendance - pay for all 10 weeks or nothing. As it happened, the students did always clash with it anyhow, so I didn't go back, and didn't finish the design.
I don't want to bin the half-finished piece, though I want to do something else for a while. This morning I thought of how I might safely remove the piece from the pillow: stretch some fabric over my embroidery frame, carefully lift the pins and loosen the lace, lift the whole thing, pin it onto the fabric, then stitch through every pinning to secure the lace to the fabric. Remove pins. Organise the bobbins, then unwind each and stitch its thread through the fabric to stop it tangling or getting out of place. Stitch the fabric taut over a supportive base, and the lace should be safe to put away! Tension is important; I can't just take the pins out, the thing would lose structural integrity. And I will not be at home to anyone while I'm transferring - once I've started, I'll have to finish, though swearing at the inconvenience of only having two hands when eight or ten would be much more useful.
[EDIT: Darn. Forgot about the paper pattern. The lace is pinned onto the pattern, pinned onto the pillow. This won't work transferred to cloth. I'll need to find a thick cork tile or piece of polystyrene or foam rubber.]
Then when I have my pillow back, and my bobbins, I can think of making wonderful stuff. I like art deco designs, and the avant garde stuff in some of the lace magazines - giant stuff, organic and unwieldy, using colours and textures and sometimes as large as macrame (my teacher hated it). I have a book of logarithmic lace - designs marked onto log-linear paper instead of plain squares.
Look at MocoLoco! Amongst these beautiful, marvellous things are fibreoptic lace chandeliers! They're past about a dozen things, many of which make the lights seem dull and pedestrian in comparison.
[Edit: I like the embroidered tapped phonecall waveforms, right at the bottom]
Oh, all of a sudden I realise I've only seen the tip of the iceberg where design is concerned. I want to dive in to the iceberg's sunken heart, with my heat ray and giant dentist's suction tube, to hollow out yawning caverns, tunnels and podules, with blue glassy walls some of which you can see the sea through, and fill them with light and colour and beautiful things.
The main impediment to getting on with lace though, is the Previous Project Of Doom. Started when I was in the class, it is two figures dancing. The whole class was making designs of dancers and musicians to go on a tea towel we'd sell for charity. (Again, you photograph the lace against a coloured background and print onto linen - we do not make teatowels from lace!) Mine got rather complicated, too many arms and legs and corners, and I have [counts] 24 pairs of bobbins in play. This is a lot to manage (previously I've used 6-12 pairs); it is not enough to continue now I've reached another elbow; and it is all the bobbins I have.
[EDIT: as well as the 24 pairs of bobbins, I've found 7 pairs of orphaned threads which ought to have bobbins attached but I took them off because I needed them elsewhere. Aie!]
It is far too late (years) to complete it for the group's teatowel, and I feel bad about that. I'd never know until a couple of weeks into the class term whether it would clash with a student's lecture. The class did not permit casual weekly attendance - pay for all 10 weeks or nothing. As it happened, the students did always clash with it anyhow, so I didn't go back, and didn't finish the design.
I don't want to bin the half-finished piece, though I want to do something else for a while. This morning I thought of how I might safely remove the piece from the pillow: stretch some fabric over my embroidery frame, carefully lift the pins and loosen the lace, lift the whole thing, pin it onto the fabric, then stitch through every pinning to secure the lace to the fabric. Remove pins. Organise the bobbins, then unwind each and stitch its thread through the fabric to stop it tangling or getting out of place. Stitch the fabric taut over a supportive base, and the lace should be safe to put away! Tension is important; I can't just take the pins out, the thing would lose structural integrity. And I will not be at home to anyone while I'm transferring - once I've started, I'll have to finish, though swearing at the inconvenience of only having two hands when eight or ten would be much more useful.
[EDIT: Darn. Forgot about the paper pattern. The lace is pinned onto the pattern, pinned onto the pillow. This won't work transferred to cloth. I'll need to find a thick cork tile or piece of polystyrene or foam rubber.]
Then when I have my pillow back, and my bobbins, I can think of making wonderful stuff. I like art deco designs, and the avant garde stuff in some of the lace magazines - giant stuff, organic and unwieldy, using colours and textures and sometimes as large as macrame (my teacher hated it). I have a book of logarithmic lace - designs marked onto log-linear paper instead of plain squares.
Look at MocoLoco! Amongst these beautiful, marvellous things are fibreoptic lace chandeliers! They're past about a dozen things, many of which make the lights seem dull and pedestrian in comparison.
[Edit: I like the embroidered tapped phonecall waveforms, right at the bottom]
Oh, all of a sudden I realise I've only seen the tip of the iceberg where design is concerned. I want to dive in to the iceberg's sunken heart, with my heat ray and giant dentist's suction tube, to hollow out yawning caverns, tunnels and podules, with blue glassy walls some of which you can see the sea through, and fill them with light and colour and beautiful things.
A tangential suggestion
If you aren't (and I know what it's like: for me, the minute I take a knitting project off the needles they're on--because I need those particular needles for something else--and slide the half-done piece onto waste yarn, I know realistically that I'm not going to come back to it however good my intentions), why not seize it as the first diving-into-the-sea-of-design project? Fix it on fabric as you described, but permanently and on something big and good to work on, then extend the dancers using different techniques and materials, making it the centre of some wonderful experiment. Add macrame. Add fibre optics (those lamps are way cool: I want to knit something like that--now!).
Your lace teacher would hate this, of course.
Re: A tangential suggestion
But I'd like to keep the option of completing it, maybe as a sampler, maybe as a practice piece to try out going round corners. I'm still very much a learner. There are some parts of the piece I'm pleased with, I got a nice swirly effect on the lady dancer's dress. There's nothing to stop me working on the lace while it's fixed to fabric, though I should probably use a contrasting colour to stop myself going blind.
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Yes, I could have a jolly good splurge on eBay for more bobbins, but it would behove me to restrict myself to smaller projects till I come back to Cambridge, I think.
Something I would like to do is write/use a program to make lace. I don't know if such a thing exists. I imagine one could import a line drawing to start, "prick" the pinholes (a set of coordinates), then apply different stitches along parts of the design to see how it would turn out in lace. It would be jolly interesting, systematising the craft, but I haven't the faintest idea how to go about it :-)
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Oh Rahly! ROFLMAO.
I bet you have one or two more clues than *I* do. You totally gorgeous geek. Systemising lace making, honestly, call yourself a girl? ;P
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Given my feeble protestations above, I could go a long way very fast if I had someone to bounce ideas off, and suggest pros and cons of different approaches. The approach I have most ingrained is not a good one for this problem. And I don't know about graphics.
Geeks with copious spare time/a few hours to point and laugh, apply within...
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