I sent kids off to school and never finished my note about the porcelain
lace that Tamara mentioned.
Before I learned bobbin lace, I learned pottery. It's just as addicting but
not as portable. The two overlapped for a while, but when I met my DH,
something had to give way and it was the pottery. When I returned to
working with clay, I tried to make lace in it but there were
obstacles. Clay dries fast, cracks and/or breaks when it is pushed too
far, and it's very fragile before it's fired.
The clay I'm using is porcelain with organic fibers added to increase its
strength. The coils are about the thickness of a pencil, and I've found
that since I can't use bobbins, I have to limit the lengths I work with so
they stay manageable. The weaving time itself is fairly short, but the time
spent drafting patterns and cleaning up the dings and fingerprints is
considerable.
I'm probably pushing the lace definition a lot to even call this lace. It's
a new medium for lace, and it presents a new and possibly educational way
of looking at lace. It's a lot easier to see where the threads go when the
imaginary pins are 2 inches apart! The pieces I've made so far represent
the elements of a pattern- a single Flemish ground block, a spider, a Rose
ground block. This is really breaking the patterns down to their basics.
The sizes are limited to the restrictions of the kiln space, so I can't
make any pieces larger than 18" across but I want to try sections that can
be assembled into larger works. And definitely something in 3D!
So far though, only a couple pieces have survived the firing, so there are
changes to be made in that area. Specifically, I need to make some clay
trays that the work can be placed on and stay on throughout the entire
weaving and firing process. So it'll be a couple weeks before I make
anymore weavings. I have put a couple pictures on webshots of two of the
pieces. These are before the firing.
http://community.webshots.com/user/CherryJene
Cherry Knobloch
Chesapeake, Virginia
USA
-
To unsubscribe send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] containing the line:
unsubscribe lace [EMAIL PROTECTED] For help, write to
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
