Hi Everybody: I have a feeling that historically, lacemakers didn’t tension quite as much as we do.
When I was learning Mechlin ground, for example, I was advised to just tension after the first CTC and then not to worry so much at the end of the ground stitch. That worked better than all the tensioning I had been doing. In cloth stitch areas, it’s amazing how things pull themselves into shape a row or two later, without me being that concerned with tension. Of course if there are great loops in my work I do tension them out, but I find I can usually not tension as much as I used to, and it makes no difference. There are lots of times when you don’t need support pins because the passive pair that has just been picked up as a worker can be tensioned while holding down the pair next to it. So, if you pick up a passive pair on the left of the cloth area, and work it across to the right, when you tension it you just make sure you hold down the passive pair that was just to the right of where it was originally. That pair, held down, will prevent you from pulling the cloth stitch area out of shape. And then sometimes there’s no pair to tension against, or for some other reason you want to use a support pin. If you get to the end of the row and you see the support pin wasn’t in the right place, move it. You don’t need to undo your work, just pick your pin up and budge it over a bit. There will always be a little hole in the lace from the support pin, but when you finish the lace and it gets dampened, you can fiddle with the little hole then if it really bothers you. Hope this helps. Adele West Vancouver, BC (west coast of Canada) - 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/
