Bobbin lacemaking must be the most inefficient way to make (admittedly ornate) cloth that anyone ever came up with. Still, in a world with ASCII versions of B-movies, what obsessive re-creation could be surprising? And, unusual among handwork, it doesn't aggravate my tendinitis, probably because one doesn't have to maintain the thread tension by hand; the weight of the bobbins does that. As with many relaxing pastimes, including not just handwork but Tetris, the boring repetition is much of the charm. I really enjoy the tapping noise the bobbins make. I don't know which childhood toy they sound like; probably Lincoln logs or Tinkertoys, which were also made of softwood.
Apologia over, I can say that of all the beginner's books I've looked at, and the leaflet that comes with the beginner's kit from Lacis, this is by far the best. The patterns are simple but reasonably attractive, they are given in a very logical progression of techniques, and the painstaking linework is really useful. Every exercise, and most of the beginner's patterns, is drawn out with each over-and-under clear to see, and the the drawing is also color-coded so that you know which stitch was used to generate a given crossing.
Cook also uses color for the threads themselves in the beginner's exercises. The exercises are so symmetrical that an error will show up in asymmetrical color. The results are more like 1970s macramé armbands than old lace, but as a pedagogical technique it's effective.
Somewhere else I ran across a mention of Torchon lace as 'ragged lace' or 'beggars' lace', because it's the simplest bobbin lace, the one a farm family might plausibly make for their own use. What startling exaggeration; it still requires hours of handwork, regular thread, and an undisturbed padded surface to work on, any of which a beggar would be hard put to preserve for her own use.
ISBN: 0713457406
So wrote clew in Art. | TrackBack