Hi all Sue Babbs has very kindly uploaded 3 photos on to my Flickr set. This is the project I have been busy with for the whole year.
Following the Witwatersrand Lace Guild's convention in Bloemfontein in November 2012. They were asked to submit an entry for the exhibition this year commemorating the centenary of the Women's Monument at the War Museum of the Boer Republics in Bloemfontein. Well, somehow I got delegated to make the actual lace! The monument is 37 metres high and is made in the local sandstone. The bronze figures of the women and the dead child was from a design by Emily Hobhouse and constructed by Anton van Wouw. My lace monument is 53cms high and 59cms wide. It took 2 reels of Filato per Tombolo di Cantu cotton thread No. 50 and Egyptian cotton 180/2 for the figures. It was made in sections, rolling the edges as with Withof Lace and took approximately 430 hours from September 2012 to September 2013. This included a lot of practice pieces and undoing and redoing, especially in the figures. When doing the actual monument, every evening when I sat down with my pillow and 100 or more bobbins on it, my husband would say I was putting another brick in the wall or laying another row of bricks. To keep the figures of the women and child to the correct scale of the monument, they are only 7cms tall, so an enlargement is provided for you to see the actual hand-made lace. The wreath is composed of white flowers made by members of the Witwatersrand Lace Guild. The Women's monument was erected tin memory of the 4177 women and 22074 children who died in the concentration camps during the second Anglo-Boer war, 11 October 1899 until 31 May 1902, and was unveiled on 16th December 1913. A repeat of the unveiling ceremony was enacted on Dec 16 2013. It was rather overshadowed though, by the passing of Nelson Mandela and the 10 days of National mourning. We drove the 4 hours to Bloemfontein to deliver it to the museum when it was all framed, and spent some time with the new lace group in Bloem - Rosestad Kant (Rose City Lace). The exhibition will be open until the end of February 2013 and I hope that the museum will keep the lace monument on show. It was a mammoth task and took up most of my lacemaking time this year. I hope that I can get back to doing some more conventional lace this year. Season's greetings and best wishes for 2014, with lots of time to practice and perfect our lacemaking skills. from Janis Savage in midsummer in Honeydew near Johannesburg. -- Janis Savage t/a The Lace Place thelacepl...@hotmail.co.za www.thelaceplace.co.za Tel: 082 807 7858 - To unsubscribe send email to majord...@arachne.com containing the line: unsubscribe lace y...@address.here. For help, write to arachne.modera...@gmail.com. Photo site: http://www.flickr.com/photos/lacemaker/sets/
