I have always been interested in the sort of disconnect in the lace world between the amount of effort that it takes to design a bobbin lace pattern and the amount of value that is associated with that. Simply designing and making a piece is just the first step. Designing a pattern is really difficult because it isnât just coming up with a pleasing piece, it is also trying to write the instructions so that anyone can do it. You need to be able to diagram and also do thread drawings. You have to start with readily available threads. You have to tailor it to a skill level that is widely available. I imagine you have to make it several times as you try to get the smoothest version. The amount of time the designer devotes to streamlining the pattern results in the ability of the lacemaker to have a really nice, satisfying piece right off the bat without spending lots of time and frustration trying to make a piece from scratch. It is really quite a lot of fun to make an attractive piece where someone else has conquered all the design challenges for you. I enjoy the activity of following a diagram, which is a different kind of fun than designing something.
Throughout all the years that I have been associated with the Bulletin of the IOLI the most common comment has been that people want more patterns in the publication. But that desire has not been equally matched by the number of people who want to go through the extensive work of designing patterns to contribute to the publication. In my estimation, writing articles like the ones I have written involves less time than designing a bobbin lace pattern. We were always very grateful to authors who would contribute a pattern in order to promote a book, and, of course, other contributors and editors. Yet, we never had enough to satisfy the readers. At one time I thought maybe we should have a series on how to design patterns, so that people could design their own, and hopefully stop asking for them in the Bulletin. Another brainstorm I had was to pay Michel Jourde who was a designer for Lace Express, to design a series of patterns to be exclusive to us. Our editor at the time did not want to do this because she felt that the mission of the publication was to share things among the members. But that left us with the problem that hundreds of members wanted patterns, and very few designed them. One attempt to produce more patterns was to require the winners of the original lace design contest to provide the pattern of the piece for âfirst publicationâ I was fearful that this requirement would keep people from entering the contest because they wouldnât want to write out every step and diagram every difficult corner. But, actually the patterns produced tended to be sketches with a few notes and not as fully described as a commercial pattern. I sometimes wonder if anyone has ever successfully made one of the contest entries. However, In some ways the exercise of publishing these patterns really has done a lot to illuminate how people do original lace art. They make a sketch and apply a wide range of techniques that they have in their skill tool box to it. This was sort of the idea I once had about doing a series about how to design your own lace piece, so maybe that is the impact it is having. But, a comparable concept would be to have an oil painting contest where artists paint an original picture and then provide instructions so that other people could paint the same picture. One question I have wondered about, in my decades of thinking about this, is why people want patterns from the magazine when they all make different kinds of lace and could easily purchase a book of patterns of the kind of lace they make. If you have ever tried to design a pattern you quickly come to the conclusion that the books, although expensive, are actually cheap for the amount of time involved in designing patterns. It is interesting that in the comments from Lace Express they actually stated that their lace designers did not make an hourly wage that is commensurate with the norm, so the designers were really contributing a lot of uncompensated value to the magazine, and even so, the magazine was unable to go on. I visited Michel Jourde some years ago and bought some patterns from him. I think they were about $5 a piece. Later I had a discussion with Holly about whether she would like to carry his patterns and she said that her customers did not like to buy individual patterns. I think that Michel was actually someone who was seriously trying to make money with his pattern design, but it seems that the structure of the market was against him. I wonder what the average amount of time is for designing a pattern? When we ask people to contribute a pattern to a project are we essentially asking for 50 hours of their time? At a rate of say, $10 an hour, is it the same as soliciting $500 from people or asking them to provide over a week a full time labor? While no one supports copyright infringement, is there some kind of a market issue that at a certain price, say $5 for one pattern, the lace maker decides instead to make a pattern in the public domain? Devon Sent from Mail for Windows 10 - 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/
