I’d be a worried that the oil in this head cement would penetrate the lace further than the spot where you put it. Oil changes the colour of natural fibres - I’ve damaged dozens of T-shirts when a small drop of oil turned into a nickel-sized stain! You can scrub a T-shirt and use stain removers on it, but that sort of heavy intervention would damage lace.
Plus I don’t want hard spots here and there in my lace. I’ve never seen head cement, but it doesn’t sound soft and pliable to me. When I first started lacemaking, and was using thicker threads, I would put a dab of fabric glue on each knot. Those dabs, though the glue was advertised as clear and non-staining, turned deep amber colour within a couple of years. I no longer use anything on my lace that won’t rinse out. Usually by the time a lacemaker is making the finer laces where threads are added and taken out, they have absolutely no problem with ends. There are many techniques - you can run them into dense cloth stitch and then just clip close to the surface, you can run them for a while with the gimp and then clip off - there are whole books devoted to these tricks! Hope this helps. Adele West Vancouver, BC (west coast of Canada) > Why not use head cement after tying the knot? ... > > … I can see where this might not be necessary with a five pair tape lace, but > it > certainly might be nice with some of the more complex high pair count laces, > especially with those that require frequent adding and removing of additional > pairs throughout the work. > > Thoughts? > > Dan in DC being parboiled daily. > calt...@yahoo.com - 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/
