While it is true, if you can follow a diagram you can probably do any lace - I can speak from experience on diving right away into a nice but more complex than I realized Flanders piece. I had made a sample of Flanders ground so I knew what to do there. It was an oval edging, and it was very pretty. I plunged in, hung bobbins according to the diagram and slowly made the first pattern-repeat, then the next and about halfway through the project realized I was married to the diagram, I couldn't manage the motifs in the lace without it. The thread paths weren't any more clear to me than when I started - I like the freedom that comes with understanding how the lace is built. So, I've been quite happy to learn Flanders from the ground up through the Niven book, although with so much lace and so little time I only manage to advance one lesson a year, if free time in the summer allows.
Alice wrote:
So, if you can follow a diagram and have very good general lace skills, you should be able to do Binche without taking all those other classes first. I often wondered, 2-3 centuries ago, did the people in the area making Binche lace have to make other laces first? Or did they just learn what their mothers and neighbors were making?
I wonder about that, too. The paradigm of the time was different than now of course. And I'm thinking it was probably quite easy for someone of the time to make a lace without having drawn it first - by looking at someone else making it. I think skills like that were more acute than we can imagine in this day. -- Bev in Sooke BC (on beautiful Vancouver Island, west coast of Canada) - To unsubscribe send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] containing the line: unsubscribe lace [EMAIL PROTECTED] For help, write to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
