No, it's *not* warm enough here in sunny downtown Canberra! Thick frost has been appearing regularly for the last couple of weeks, and doesn't burn off until 11 am some mornings. I must be getting old, my fingers cramp up with the cold these days....
The lace on my pillow is a lovely Bedfordshire-esque edging I started before I came to Australia. It takes about 2-1/2 hours to do one repeat, and I only have about 18-19 (must count them...) repeats done. This particular pillow pretty much only gets worked on when I take it to lace demos --- where I sometimes do other laces instead of bobbin. I'm not taking the lace off the pillow 'til I've done 100 repeats or more. Each repeat has 10 leaves in it. I was told many years ago that you can't consider yourself an expert bobbin-lace-maker until you've made a thousand leaves in your lace, so this is my future proof of expertise! .... Well, I can dream, can't I !?
Needle-lace is my first love, but I mostly do the bobbin lace at demos because it looks more showy. This edging came out of a French book; it's been so long that I don't remember the name of the book or the author, but I just fell in love with the lace in the picture and *had* to make it. It's not "true" Beds because (besides being French ;-D ) it has lozenges of rose-ground in it.
I'm doing another demo on Friday, where I'll get to sit *all day* and make lace (yay!) (now that the kids are older teens and don't need me to be home for them every day after school). I usually work the bobbin lace, but put out finished and unfinished needle laces to show folks the difference. (Janette, my cohort in crime, brings along the tatting. :-D ) One piece I started many years ago pulls people up short a bit, now, here in Canberra: it's a colored silk lace, designed from a sketch I made on Cooleman Ridge, showing a vast hillside of golden wild barley, going up to a small grey green tree at the ridgeline, silhouetted against a gorgeously vivid blue sky. Cooleman Ridge was the site of a little nature-trail that was burned crispy in the fire-storms that took out the suburbs of Duffy and Chapman that border on it (the ridge) last January. A local group had got together to build the nature trail, and the Parks department took over its maintenance. I still don't know if anyone will re-build the nature trail: although some rains have come and the land is recovering, it's still early days yet. And of course the tree isn't there.
Anyway, that's what I've been up to. I need more lace pillows! But then I'd only have more unfinished pieces, I suppose (sigh!) .... :-D
Thanks for asking, Bev!
Beth --- here in sunny downtown Fisher, Canberra
On Wednesday, July 30, 2003, at 09:48 AM, Bev Walker wrote:
Hi all
For those not going over lists and checking them twice to go to
convention, how're things, lace-wise? Everyone cool enough (or warm enough
or tepid enough - this is hemisphere friendly) to do lace? And what's on
your pillow now?
Let's fill in the time until convention reports come our way...
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