It would be perfectly legal to draft the pattern from scratch working from the photo of either the Ruth Bean version or the older pre Bean print runs. In the process some differences would creep in anyway. Particularly if the lacemaker freely acknowledged the original source material.
But if you have the experience to do that, why not design your own mat over a point ground net background. If you can't draw from scratch then take motifs from other pieces as your starting point, as Jean said. Although either of these options would be a huge task, I think it would still be easier than trying to work over the top of a not clear photograph. It would be so difficult with that to see where you might want to put the pins, and which are your threads and which are white parts of the photo. Having looked at the photos in both my 1926 Channer and my 1953 revised edition, I can tell you that under any magnification at all the picture just breaks down into dots and cross hatchings or whatever the photo equivalents of pixels are. It is really not possible to see where pins might have been placed around the cloth stitch motifs and absolutely impossible to get any help from the photo on points such as how many pairs have been used, added or removed. We have been spoilt by our modern digital photos and on screen enlargements, allowing us to follow a pattern thread by thread. I don't have the Ruth Bean reprint so it is possible the photo in that of Pat Bury's mat might be a better quality and more amenable to enlarging, but even if it is I still believe it would be more of a challenge to work over a photo than onto a pricking and I suspect those of you who have made the mat would feel it was sufficiently challenging already. One of my Students is currently working a Floral Bucks brush back, I think a Marjorie Carter design from an ancient Lace Society magazine. Even with a well made pricking it's sometimes hard to plan through the forest of pins which ground pairs are available, how many extras might be needed for the cloth work and if a pair can be removed or should be carried a short way with a gimp to be used in the next bit of cloth stitch. If she had a photo underneath it would all be so 'busy' I think she'd have cut it off long ago. As it is, there's no photo at all so she is working by reading the pricking in the traditional way! Jacquie in Lincolnshire. - To unsubscribe send email to majord...@arachne.com containing the line: unsubscribe lace y...@address.here. For help, write to arachne.modera...@gmail.com. Photo site: http://www.flickr.com/photos/lacemaker/sets/
