Gentle Spiders,
Due to house-guests (cooking, laundry), canning, and increased volume of private mail, I had to take a break in my reporting. But ought to be able to squeeze in part two tonight.
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On Monday, 11 July, on the stroke of 9, I appeared at my workshop. That was Freehand Lace (lace made with pins on the sides only, but other than Milanese), Slovak variety, with Juraj Zajonc (pronounced You-rai Za-yontz) from Bratislava.
Because of my preceding voyages through Poland, I elected not to drag my own pillow with me, and, instead, applied for a loan of one, bringing only my own bobbins. The poillow was waiting for me that Monday morning, and it was an itty-bitty bolster, dressed in a flowery "coat" and sitting in a funny little "cradle" . Ouch. I've never before worked on a bolster pillow, though have - once or twice - watched, with amazement, other people use it, proving it was possible. But not, I thought, for me. Definitely, an adventure which needed to be approached slowly and cautiously; a "Scarlett moment" (I'll think about it tomorrow)...
A look around the classroom revealed that, although some people brought their own, flat, pillows, those who were borrowing theirs didn't seem to be at all dismayed by what looked like oversized rollers. Perhaps it won't be too bad... It was :)
To make our life easier, Mr Zajonc cheated a bit, and provided us with patterns; the width of the lace and the pin spacing were not left to our judgment as they would have been in case of the lacemakers of old. But that wasn't enough help, as far as I was concerned. The 16 pairs of bobbins seemed to transform themselves into hundreds of unruly brats. They skittered, rolled, and tangled a slightest opportunity; even trying to pin out every pair didn't help. But the worst was the method of working: you just *cannot* work them with palms down...
The mid-morning break (coffee and pastry) couldn't come too soon; after 90 minutes of struggling, I still hadn't a single stitch which was right, and was dying for a cigarette. Refreshed (to each her own, and I did have to go outside to smoke <g>), I managed half a repeat of the first sample in the hour before lunch. Never mind it looked like dog's dinner; at least it was there, despite the bobbins' continued civil disobedience. The hours after lunch (with another break in the middle) produced a repeat and a half and a sigh of relief. I watched - with total disbelief - as other people packed their pillows to take "home" for more torture. I don't believe in homework at workshops; I give it my best during the "working hours", but enough is enough.
Tuesday, I made an effort to come to class half an hour early, but so did almost everyone else. And *they* had at least 3 repeats of the first sample, and were gearing up for the second... I made my own 3rd repeat by the midmorning break, and started on the second sample. That one was a bit easier, because of a simpler design. Also because, suddenly, only every second pair of bobbins slipped out of my palms-up fingers instead of every single one. But they still jumped over at least 3 pairs when they did slip out, so I was spending more time untangling them than making lace...
Sometime during the afternoon, we received our Congress bags - nice indigo blue, with white flowers, and Praha 2004 logo on the front pocket. A good excuse to stop working and look through the enclosed papers, though I didn't like Lena's (she was both my room-mate and my class-mate) guess that the zipper was there to make the packing and unpacking of the pillow easier, for carrying to and from class. I don't believe in homework, etc...
Leonard (also a class-mate) has already talked about the exhibition we were taken to that evening. Although, with a few exceptions, I'm not overly fond of "modern lace", I did spot some interesting techniques and tricks, so it was worth while. After, I stuck like a burr to Lena and some other Swedes, thus managing to get back home via the metro/bus route with them (the organisers seemed to want to lose us, like unwanted puppies; they'd bus us out, then hand us tickets to come back on our own. My map-reading skills are almost as non-existent as the geometry ones <g>).
Wednesday morning, I finished the 3rd repeat of my second sample and, although it looked no better than the first one, decided to cut the bobbins off and start on the 3rd, (and my favourite) sample. By mid-afternoon break, when everyone else was beginning sample #4, I finally began to see the logic of #3; something that I never quite got with the other 2 samples. And the bobbins were moving from hand to hand with much more ease, hardly ever slipping out...
Decided to skip that evening's exhibition, and took the pillow and sample home for a spot of solitary battle; never mind principles about homework... :)
Of all the problems I encountered in the workshop (new lace, new pillow, new way of handling bobbins) the most pressing seemed to be the matter of height, and that was what I wanted to concentrate on, unobserved. We had been told, repeatedly, that one should work on top of the pillow. But the pillow, standing on the table in its cradle, obstinately presented its side to me, when I sat in the chair. I tried working standing up and it was tiring. I tried working sitting on the arm of the chair (placed sideways to the table) and it was painful. At home, I tried several locations and found that, sitting on one chair and keeping the pillow on another one, while awkward (had to sit sideways), did give me a bird's-eye view of the top of the pillow. Everything else clicked into place from then on; the bobbins moved obediently, I only needed to consult the diagram once per repeat...
By Thursday - the last day of the workshop, and only half a day - I had a strip of about 5" of sample #3, decent enough looking to impress even Mr Zajonc :) So I kept at it, giving up on #4 entirely (in another lifetime, maybe <g>) through the morning, then carefully wrapped the piece, with the pattern and the bobbins, and brought it home with me. In time stolen from housework duties, I managed to get it to where I wanted it: 24cm (9.5"), to decorate the front pocket of my Congress pillow; it's now pinned on, ready for mounting, and it fits "just so", making a *perfect* souvenir of both the Congress and the workshop <g>.
I have also, somewhere along the line, developed a lust for a bolster of my own. I'll have to think about it... Tomorrow :)
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Tamara P Duvall http://lorien.emufarm.org/~tpd
Lexington, Virginia, USA (Formerly of Warsaw, Poland)
Healthy US through The No-CARB Diet:
no C-heney, no A-shcroft, no R-umsfeld, no B-ush.
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