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In a message dated 8/19/2004 3:33:08 AM Eastern Daylight Time, Tamara Duvall
writes:
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...
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Tamara mentions above my being "unfrustrated" by a project. This has made
me think about how much fun my current project is. It has got the most
wonderful easy-to-follow diagram.
My current project is the black Chantilly fan from Ulrike Lohr's box of
patterns "Hausdragon". In basic concept and in most of the details, this is a
very simple piece: it is just large blocky half-stitch figures surrounded by
ground. Some honeycomb thrown in.
It's good that most of the piece is simple because that allows my mind to
really focus on the complicated part: the boundary where half-stitch meets
ground. This is orders of magnitude more complicated then I've dealt with
before.
The half-stitch weavers do the most amazing things. Sometimes the weaver
changes into a passive and a new weaver take over. It does this at places
where the figure forms an L-shape--I'd seen that before--but also at various
places where the weaver is running along the top or bottom of the figure.
Sometimes it seems as if the weaver had tried to make it all the way across the
figure but just got tired and dropped into being a passive. Sometimes the weaver,
having gone through many passives, stops and makes a stitch--apparently
gasping for breath--and the plunges forward again instead of bouncing back in the
direction it came from. There are lots of 'J' shaped figures where two separate
weavers meet and then some decision has to be made about which weaver drops
out and which keeps on.
At the beginning of each figure, some random number of pairs are added in.
Why? Clearly it's to increase the density of the half-stitch so that it is
more aesthetically pleasing, but how does Lohr figure out exactly how many
pairs to add? She could have made all the figures many times, experimenting with
different numbers of passives (this would be appropriate behavior on the part
of a beginner), but surely it is more likely that she is using some general
rules of thumb that she has devised over the years or which are standard to
Chantilly. I wonder what they are? I wonder if there is some sort of ratio of
half-stitch density to ground density that she is trying to achieve.
I've almost finished the first fifth of the fan, whis is a bird head and
neck. The neck has "fins" sticking out of it. When I first looked at them, I
thought that all the fins were exactly the same except for each one's being a
little bigger than the one above it. The diagrams reveal, however, that each
fin is actually tilted at a slightly different angle, which causes each fin to
have a different weaver pattern. It amused me that these fins, which looked
identical by eye, turned out to be so diferent by execution.
Now I'm approaching the wide bottom of the neck and the weaver seems about
to go into another one of those "I'm too tired to make it all the way
across, so I'm going to be constantly stopping and making stitches".
Oops, this message got too long. I could go on--the interesting behavior
of the honeycomb column that hugs headside, having extra pairs travel with the
gimp instead of cutting them off, half-stitch going at twice the speed of
ground-- but I'll cut it off. The point is, I am really impressed with how easy
Ulrike Lohr has made this. Here she is, doing just amazing stuff, and yet it's
been completely easy to do. I have not been at all frustrated. That's the
mark of a really well-designed thing: it should seem really easy and obvious.
The weaver is complicated because Bucks Point is based on a grid and the
figures here are not grid-shaped (ie, they aren't diamonds). To an advanced
lacer this might all seem blindingly simple and dull, but, to someone with no
experience in floral Bucks Point, this project is like a virtuoso demonstration
of ways to gracefully pull irregular shapes out of the ground. Being
grid-based does not mean that you have to restrict the shapes of your figures.
However, it's for intermediate Bucks Pointers, not beginners. It's quite
fine. She assumes that you know how to add in and take out pairs. She
doesn't give gimp diagrams, which is ok since the gimp is easy, but so far I've run
into two sections that were impossible to do because of the gimp (lacking
guidance, I used gimp loops). She doesn't explain what stitches to use in the
diagram because you should just be able to tell by the thread movements which
stitches are ground, honeycomb, or half-stitch. It's fun! Go for it!
Julie Baltimore MD
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