After several years of teaching, I am clear on only one thing: everyone learns differently!
With that qualification, students have been most successful (as defined by them understanding and succeeding) with the approach as follows: Start with cloth stitch "bandage", all passives in one color, workers in a contrasting color. As others have mentioned, it makes it very easy to see when you've lost one or both of your workers, and to see what is happening in the structure. When student feels comfortable with this stitch and I feel that they have learned how to tension properly, then... Move to whole stitch (c-t-c-t), where students see that there are still two workers, but tension is a bit more difficult. They also get to start seeing that the pairs hang twisted, not open. Finally, we move to half stitch, specifying that the student use two twists at the end of the row--this ensures that they have the same worker (albeit one thread) for all rows. With the contrasting color thread, they can see very clearly the structure of this stitch: one thread is the worker, while the other thread proceeds diagonally through the lace. It isn't very pretty, but it helps them learn the structure of what is happening. The biggest problem I've found is that half stitch is very easy until you make a mistake. To get past this, I usually come by and jumble up their bobbins, as if they dropped their pillow. I then walk them through the question of "how do you figure out where you were?" 1) get all the bobbins in order; 2) find the worker thread by looking for the one that had traveled; 3) find it's mate (the one right behind it); 4) re-"pair" the bobbins; 5) twist all the pairs. Once they've done this, they feel more confident about proceeding, and their ability to rescue themselves when they get lost. At the end of the evening the student feels confident, but challenged by their homework: do it again, all in the same color. Then they learn to rely on the threads, not the color. After that, they can make snakes galore. I've used this on students from 5 to 83, and haven't seen that age makes much difference at this stage. Cathy Belleville Los Altos, California - To unsubscribe send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] containing the line: unsubscribe lace [EMAIL PROTECTED] For help, write to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
