Carol and the spiders (that always sounds like a rock band), I've been thinking about this all afternoon now and feeling really rotten to be Casandra standing the market place here.
What I will say is that I think there are more events because the average age of lacemakers is such that they are in early / retirement and what if commonly called the silver market - ie kids gone, house paid off, money behind them and time for themselves - so they are happy to organise and attend events and expect more events to be held simply because they have the opportunity to attend them. My local lace group has had about 10 - 15% new recruits over the last 3 years who have come to lacemaking because they have taken early retirement and are looking to take up a craft they have always wanted to do - however, the number of Adult Education Classes have diminished in our area and now there are very few places to learn because the number of learner has dropped off. But here is the Catch 22 - no learners - no classes - no classes - no where to learn. I have a real fear is the actual age of the lacemakers is rising and that we are about to see a horrible decline in the next 10 - 15 years as the average age hits 80 plus. Does anyone know if the Lace Guild have any demographics on this? I have a simply policy - anyone who asks to learn lace, I will teach. That way, if I teach just two people I have increased my contribution to the gene pool. Regards Liz Beecher I'm <A HREF="http://journals.aol.com/thelacebee/thelacebee";>blogging</A> now - see what it's all about In a message dated 30/09/2003 09:29:01 GMT Daylight Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: > However, I am not sure that this is showing a decline in Lace Makers. A > quick scan of the "Events" pages in the Lacemakers' Circle or the Lace Guild > newsletters shows that a dedicated Lace-maker (and aren't we all?) could > attend a Lace Day or Suppliers Fair most weekends of the year. When I > started to make lace, there certainly wasn't the proliferation of lace > groups and consequent events held - so for those events that were staged, > attendance was very high indeed. Nowadays, we can attend the events > closest to us, and even if we only belong to one county group,. we can still > average about one event a month. > > Perhaps a better indication of the state of lace-making is the number of new > lace-makers being introduced to the art. Are the classes managing to > recruit new members - especially younger people? Are we able to publicise > lace-making enough to keep up the recruitment figures? I am lucky in my > classes - they are private classes, but held in local schools, and because > they are not local education classes, I can have youngsters under the age of > 15 in the class, which, when the classes I taught were run by the LEA, was > not possible for some unexplained reason. (Again, this was several years > ago, so things may well have improved ........) - To unsubscribe send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] containing the line: unsubscribe lace [EMAIL PROTECTED] For help, write to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
