Doris Southard in her "Lessons in Bobbin Lacemaking" mentions two different methods of handling the bobbins: "palms up" and "palms dowm". Could someone explain to me what they look like or what the difference is?
Weronika
Hi Weronika,
Palms up is the position of the hands that can be used when working on a bolster pillow. Since the bobbins hang down off the side of the large cylindrical pillow, the order of actually making the lace stitches ends with a cross and then the pin. Therefore cloth or linen stitch is twist, cross, twist, cross (TCTC) and Torchon Ground in TC pin TC. The work is essentially in the hands held in the air. This means that you can see that the threads are not crossed in a glance when it comes time to pick up any given pair again, and that you don't have to spend your time untwisting and re-twisting pairs because you can't be sure if the right number of twists are on the pairs since pairs in the right position are simply never twisted. (There can be a lot of unintentional movement when the pairs hang down.)
Palms down is the position of the hands that is usually used on a flat lace pillow (which for this discussion includes roller pillows). Ordinarily, when working in this position, the order of making stitches is to end the stitches with one or more twists after placing the pin. So cloth or linen stitch becomes CTCT and Torchon Ground is CT pin CT. The twists stay in place because the bobbins lie on the surface of the pillow and are much less prone to untwisting. In the palms down method, you simply move the bobbins, but don't hold them in your hands to make the stitches.
There has been some discussion that palms up can relieve repetitive motion problems for some people. Palms up allows the lacemaker to work standing up, which could have some ergonomic benefits also, since lacemakers tend to hunch their shoulders a lot. While the CTCT stitch order makes sense for palms down, there is nothing to prevent using the TCTC stitch order with palms down. So, palms up/down is separate but not unrelated to stitch order.
Patty Dowden
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