What I've been up to—
August 17, 2008
I'm back from the three-day Chantilly workshop with Ulrike Voelcker. On July 19, I started my practice piece for this workshop with a copy of Ulrike's new technique book, The Grammar of Point Ground, in hand. Here's what it looked like with the ground just started.
By the morning of August 9, it looked like this.
I finished it later that afternoon. In doing so, I used up both my boxes of fine silk pins and had to pull some from the beginning ground to finish the piece. There are over 1,000 in there!
Of course I needed those pins for the workshop the next day, so I took the block with the lace on it with me to rest in the pins overnight before pulling them out for the class. (There are different opinions about whether keeping the lace in the pins for a while really does anything to "set" the lace. Preferring to err on the side of caution, I didn't want to yank them out right away.)
The workshop was at the same time exhausting and exhilarating. Ulrike knows the lace to its core and demanded that we make the best lace possible. Here she is demonstrating the magic thread technique.
She got kind of tired of having her picture taken.
These is some of the Chantilly lace she brought for us to see. (Chantilly lace is pronounced as in the French—shon-tee-YEE.)
How much lace did I make in three days? A little less than 2 inches. (Photos of the unpinned workshop lace to follow.) I learned a lot, but it's good to be home.
July 12, 2008
Chantilly! Well, at least I'm preparing to do some Chantilly which is a point ground lace made with fine black silk. (For a look at some point ground, click on Bucks Point in the menu at left.) I've enrolled in a class with Ulrike Lohr Voelcker in August in Raleigh. I love her work, so I'm thrilled to have this chance to work with her, although I'm anxious that my skills won't measure up. To get ready for the class, I've had to emancipate a lot of bobbins from other projects, which either meant cutting them off the pillow or finishing the lace. I managed to finish a piece of beginning Binche complete with corner (see below) that had been on the pillow since May 2005, and a practice Milanese braid that had been lingering since March 2006. Now I'm pricking a beginning Chantilly pattern from Ulrike Lohr's first Schwarzarbeit book and will be winding the bobbins this weekend. I'd like to get that piece done for practice before my class in August. Ambitious, I know. Here's the Binche piece.
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A couple words about this piece of lace. Binche is a Belgian lace made with very fine white cotton. It's considered one of the more difficult laces, and to be honest, I bit off a little more than I could chew with this class. I did the first pattern in the class fairly easily, but I struggled with this one. I'd only been making lace for a couple years, and I had a very hard time figuring out where I was in the lace compared to the diagram. Three years and a lot of experience later, and it wasn't quite so hard, but I still couldn't do this pattern and chew gum at the same time. I forgot to scan the dime with this piece of lace, but to give you an idea of scale, it's about ½" wide.
My biggest fascination in lace lately, although not a new one, is Teneriffe and Nanduti. Teneriffe was my first experience with needle lace. Its most notable characteristic is that its supporting threads radiate out from the center of the piece. The Sol laces of Spain and Brazil and Nanduti lace from Paraguay are close relatives, differing in their technique, Teneriffe being made as individual motifs on a form and then sewn together, and the others made on a fabric backing as one piece. As far as I know, Nanduti is the only one of these laces that uses color, so I have been trying to learn more about it.
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Here is my first attempt at what I believe is a traditional jasmine pattern in Gutermann silk 100/3. My form is plastic canvas. I hope to learn about and make a great deal more of this lovely lace.
