Part III - The lacemakers

OK! Here we go with the third part of the Doune Lacemaking Week! We actually spent a lot of time with our lace pillows and bobbins this time. Sometimes when the weather is too good we, or more accurately some of us, tend to abandon the lacemaking for exploration or boat trips! It was a mixed kind of a week, but we all worked hard, and I even managed to finish a piece that has gone up to Doune for at least 3 years in a row! It shouldn't have taken that long to do but it needed a quiet spell in which to concentrate, and our local lace group meetings are anything but conducive to using the "little grey cells" (Hercules Poirot) satisfactorily. My robin motif only appeared on annual courses with our visiting tutor, or at Doune! I'll show him off in a moment as the unfinished article thick with pins and with threads to be trimmed. Then you can see the "off-the-pillow" completed piece! I'm quite pleased with it, though I can see the mistakes! It's said that every piece of handmade lace should have a mistake in it just to show it is handmade. Machine-made lace should be perfect or at least have the mistake repeated in the same place all the way through - that is if it is a repeating pattern, which my robin isn't!

Anyway, first of all you have to see the dining room where we worked (and ate of course.) This was taken one afternoon when some folk were taking a break. Only Norma and Joan are left! We love the dining room ambience: the pine-clad interior; the pictures on the walls, some of them photos taken by Andy; the odds and ends of "finds" from the 1800s; that gorgeous stove on the stone hearth; the views out the windows..... Beyond the dining room through the door is the kitchen where there are generally sounds of cooking and baking going on - and delicious aromas wafting back to us - as we work!

We call the cushion things we work on, pillows. They have to be very firm and solid to enable them to hold pins tightly. Traditionally they were made with a filling of chopped straw packed hard, but they were heavy and when high density polystyrene made an appearance, it was perfect for lighter pillows. Before you start work you "dress" your pillow, pinning the pattern on first, and then adding cover cloths which protect your threads from catching the pins, and the pillow from dust! Just the beginning of the pattern on special waxed card with the pinhole positions already pricked out is showing. The bobbins are wound with the necessary thread and pinned in place so work can begin. I don't think I'll give you a lesson in lacemaking, but I'll recommend Brenda Paternoster's website as a starting point - you will find the link in the LH column among my favourite websites.

Basically you are weaving threads, holding onto the shafts of the bobbins, guided by your pricked pattern as you put the pins in the appropriate places between threads and work on around them. The pins hold the pattern you are working on in place and should remain in the pillow till at least another inch is worked so there is little chance of the pattern being spoiled by pulling a bobbin thread too hard, and ruining the shape of your lace.

So here are photos of some of the group and their lace.

This is my little robin redbreast emerging from its forest of pins. He was designed by an English lacemaker in the type of lace known as Buckinghamshire Point, aka known just as Bucks! This is quite a fine lace and so the pin holes are very close together. As you are working you don't always see what you have worked right away because of the closeness of the pins in the recent work! It's when you begin to remove the first pins that you can see what mistakes you might have made!! Sometimes you can tell before that, as threads are not in the positions they should be - there may be too many threads at one particular point, or worse, too few! Then there's no option but to reverse lace till the problem resolves itself! And here he is, fully emerged and spruced up and looking not too much the worse for wear!

The green background doesn't do him any favours! I'll have to find a good colour to show up the lace and the brown and red threads! I'll have him framed for the wall, I think!

Here's Janet concentrating hard on her piece of Bucks Point lace. She is working on an edging that includes a fitted corner.

I love Janet's pincushion full of the coloured and ornamental pins as well as the ordinary pins we usually use in the work. - and no, this isn't the one that Ron ran off with (see my last episode!).

Over by the window are Joan and Sheila, with Margaret chatting to Sheila. She's probably admiring the complicated patterns these two work. Their style of lace comes from the Continent, of which there are many types - Flanders, Paris ground, Valencienne, Binche..... To be honest I don't know which is which. I just know that it is even finer than Bucks Point with threads like cobwebs wound onto a different type of bobbin, and that you use a lot of bobbins, and different techniques. They follow what look like very complicated enlarged working diagrams that show where the threads are coming from and where they are going. The lace is beautiful though! I think this piece is Joan's. Sheila was just starting out on a new piece so there were just pins to be seen!!!

Margaret was making an edging in Bedfordshire lace, which is recognisable by its little leaves, the curving line running through and the line and pointy edges. You'll see what I mean in this picture of Margaret's work. Generally the thread in this type of lace is thicker than in the previous kinds of lace, and feels like you are working with string after doing a finer lace.

I haven't got a photo of the bookmarks Norma made this time in Torchon lace, but here is a photo of her at work. Torchon is the type of lace most people learn at first. It is far coarser, the threads are thicker, and the patterns angular and logical. Most people go on to learn another type of lace after a while, but Norma is content working easy pieces like bookmarks and hankie edgings in what she calls Just Torchon!

Then there's our hostess who gets the chance now and again to come and sit down with her lace pillow. Liz works Honiton lace which is the queen of British laces. It really needs cobwebs for threads - well not literally - and the bobbins are small and light. Liz designs and makes her own little motifs to work, and has contributed to a series of lace books by a well known - in lace circles - English lacemaker. Her work is exquisite! At the moment she's working on a beautiful stylised flower, about 2 inches (5cm) across. The pins are pushed down into the pillow round the edges to allow room to fill the petals with a pattern.

The other picture is of a frog which I believe isn't one of her own designs - forgive me if I am wrong, Liz. The frog is about 2inches long.

Morag, whose first visit to Doune this was, did start to learn to make lace a good number of years ago, but found patchwork and quilting more of her thing. Here she is working a sample to use when she teaches - as she does!

So, that's us! The lacemakers and the patchworker! On other occasions we have had artists and sketchers with us. It was lovely having Morag there.

Next time I'll recount some of our adventures!

Talk again soon.