Nancy Your question is really interesting. I share a desire to learn how to design those laces, but I think I know the answer to "how to learn it". You just have to learn to make it, make a lot of it. In the case of Flanders look at recent books which teach Flanders basics. Most of the authors design their own patterns, at least to some extent. And you can see how they use modern ideas about gracefulness, shapes of curves, shapes of flowers and leaves, and then translate that into patterns. Then try constructing a lace by combining elements from different patterns into one piece. Take a straight lace and try to invent a corner.
Having said all this, I certainly don't claim that i can design those forms: I can't, I don't know enough yet. But it is a goal. And that is basically how I learned to design torchon. I took the patterns in Doris Southard's book and dotted them on different sizes of graph paper. (I realize this sounds silly to those whose lives started AFTER photocopy machines became common and computers were everywhere. But there was a time in living memory when those aids still didn't exist.) In the process of doing that copying I arrived at an understanding of why the pinholes were spaced as they were. Mary Niven's book has some Flanders ground grids empty of motifs, in the back of her book. Lorelei - To unsubscribe send email to [email protected] containing the line: unsubscribe lace [email protected]. For help, write to [email protected]
