On Aug 18, 2004, at 18:52, Lorelei Halley wrote:
Tamara I have the impression that you are a very creative lacemaker who is
constantly inventing new designs. So it makes sense that you are impatient
with diagrams. It goes with the territory.
Thanks for the tribute, but I'm not as inventive as all that :) Robin has picked the part of my message where I said I agreed with Leonard up to a point. She has omitted what I said immediately below:
We do need the diagrams now; none of us is a full-time, professional lacemaker, and we don't have the same arsenal of tricks in our hands and minds that they did.
I don't think I could live without diagrams; they're my lifeline when I'm learning a new technique and my safety net against the disintegrating memory. When I'm designing my own patterns, I move between pillow and drawing board constantly to diagram both the sucessfull and the unsuccessful solutions; contrary to what Robin said, I'm not really all that fond of re-inventing the wheel :)
And, contrary to the impression I must give here (when't the last time I wrote a message under 5KB? <g>), I'd much rather draw a diagram than explain things verbally; it's writing the instructions for a pattern that's about to be published, which sometimes pushes me into housecleaning - *anything* is better than writing instructions :) I write them, because not everyone is receptive to "diagrams only" method of explanation and because diagrams can sometimes leave holes which need to be plugged verbally (especially since I'm very bad at drawing thread-by-thread diagrams)
I use diagrams for all the reasons stated by Robin, Weronika and Lorelei: to learn how others have solved a problem (might use the same solution elsewhere one day), to keep the repeats at least similiar if not identical, to identify - at a glance - the thread paths for colour work. Even when I think I have the pattern in my fingers, I still like to keep a diagram nearby, to guard against those "short-circuits" of the brain when, suddenly, all the light bulbs seem die at once, and I don't remember how to cross-twist... :)
The longer I make lace, the more I learn what to expect of it in certain situations, and how to cope with a new element, sure. And I'm getting better at "reading" photos and using those as my diagrams - the way old lacemakers learnt by looking at lace already made... Yet, without a diagram, I'm lost; if it's not provided, I'm going to try and draw it myself, either before I set a stitch or shortly after.
But I still maintain that we should not let diagrams (*or* verbal instructions <g>) rule our lace-lives; lace isn't rigid, nor should we be. Past a certain point, "use your own judgment" principle ought to be tested. And it seemed to me that, if Julie is at a level where she's been tackling - for several months and unfrustrated - a Chantilly fan, then she must have accumulated plenty of good judgment (lace-wise) in her "tool kit" already. One isn't able to continue with a project of that magnitude, unless one's quite experienced. It was time for her to do as she liked, whatever the diagram said...
--- 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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