Having been reading all the arachne posts which had arrived over the last week while I was away, I have just finished off with a batch of 'leaves and tallies' ones.
Someone made a comment that she couldn't do the bolster pillow, palms up ones. I assume by that she meant the hold-three-in-one-hand and weave the other one through type. This is what I had learnt with Bridget Cook and again in Russia for (surprise, surprise) Russian lace. In Russia, several of us had a confusing session being shown how to do these by one of the young assistants. She said the technique was was called "Sheep". We exchanged confused glances, all of us trying to work out a tally connection between sheep and weaving (wool?) or sheep and leaves (fodder?). She had must have looked up the word in a dictionary to make the technique clear to us, and found our stupidity exceedingly frustrating. Finally she made an undulating motion with her hand, firmly repeating sheep, sheep. The rouble dropped and someone said "Oh, ship, of course". The action of the weaver bobbin passing through the three passives obviously mimics a ship on the waves - once you know. The difficulty I have with this technique is holding the three passives firmly enough in one hand, with the centre one straight and the two side ones spread out; cramp sets in before the tally is finished. Even more so when doing it for Bridget as she taught that the weaver passes twice around at each end. I was glad that they didn't seem to know about this in Moscow. Last weekend I was offered a gadget in exchange for a spangled bobbin - and as he was happy to take a very plain one it seemed a good swop. It's a barrel shaped piece of wood with three angled holes drilled in it to take the bottom end of the straight Spanish bobbins, and it holds them while you do the tally. I will let you know if it works! Jacquie - To unsubscribe send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] containing the line: unsubscribe lace [EMAIL PROTECTED] For help, write to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
