As a german vendor let me add to this mail: there are some shops in Germany better: in eastern Germany who are regular shops and not all of them have a mail order service. Of course most of them are shops for lacemaking and ... other handcrafts or souvenirs or something else. The cause is, that in Eastern Germany, especially in the *Erzgebirge* (iron mountain) lacemaking has a different tradition. We think to have some (may be 10) thousand women (and some single men) who learned to make lace as children from their mothers or at school. In the former GDR bobbin lace was a highly respected traditional art and was promoted by the government. Teacher were payed by the government to teach lacemaking, children had holiday camps and so on. People could earn money by making lace - not much, because it depended on the rate of exchange. This stopped 1989 and it took some years until lacemakers were interested to make lace *just for fun*. This is the cause why in nearly every town there is a shop where you can buy at least some bobbins, a pillow and some thread and in some traditional main towns you find a more interesting offer of lacemaking equipment. Up to now this is the only area in Germany, where you find many children making lace. Everybody has one member in his family who is able to show it to children. Since 7 years I try to promote this by offering a competition for children from 7 to 18 years and regularily we have around 100 children attending this competition. Most of them learn in a special lace-school, some at school, some work with their grandmothers, even some disabled children attend. We try to animate them to stay with this hobby and to work a piece of their own design. On the other hand we have a lot of older women starting to make lace. They are retired and now they have time to learn what they always wanted to, or they had learned as children and didn't have time to practice the last 40 years. I had women starting with 70+ years and they were very good because they took their time to work their lace. A last word on the shops. I think, that shops are very important for the promotion of lacemaking. They try to find ideas, things, patterns a.s.o. that make lacemaking interesting for other people. We have some longer existing shops in Germany which are rather professionally run (I count mine to these). On the other hand we see on our meetings the growing of small shops. I watch this since nearly 18 years. I think many of the new *shops* are started because people thought it would be easy to earn some money or additional money. I talk to a lot of these people and when I ask them how they are able to sell some things so cheap (I had to spend some hours to find them or to make them), they say: 'but you can't charge the time you spend'. - And when I have to pay somebody to make them? Has everybody who is dealing with lace to do it for nothing? This will be a rising problem for the shops. When you work professional, you spend thousands of Euro every month on wages, tax, insurance, rent, costs for car, telefon, fax and so on. You spend many hours on finding new ideas, going to fairs, advise lacemakers. I am happy to deal with things I love, but if I don't earn money with it I'd rather have more time to make lace. Greetings from Germany, Gabriele Kister-Schuler Die Kl�ppelkiste (bobbin chest) (<http://www.kloeppelkiste.de>)
Ilske und Peter Thomsen schrieb: > Hello Lorelei, Devon and all others, > In our country I didn't know a lace-material-vendor-shop who has regular > opening times. They come to the meetings everywhere in the country, they > send by post and if you are nearby and call them you can go there and shop. > There are shops who sell our things but under other things like wool, > patchwork utilities and so on. > What belongs the number of members, the 4 500 aren't alone Germans. We have > also family membership and lots os foreign members like Netherlands, > English, US-American and so on. And also in our country there are people who > do lacemaking without any membership somewhere. > Greetings > Ilske from Hamburg who hope that the wether will be like today the whole > next week. > > - > To unsubscribe send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] containing the line: > unsubscribe lace [EMAIL PROTECTED] For help, write to [EMAIL PROTECTED] - To unsubscribe send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] containing the line: unsubscribe lace [EMAIL PROTECTED] For help, write to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
