Bring in the Cavalry!
After spending all week here working on instructions and doing
experimental archeology, as Jill puts it, it was nice to have a crew come in to make a nice push on the pieces. We have seven people here today working on embroidery and lace. Speaking of the lace, Carolyn has come today to set more lace pieces up and rewind gold onto a bobbin that has run out. Here you see her preparing the bobbin before she will do some lace magic (to me at least) and add the end into the existing lace under work.
I had fun looking at the long piece on the pad that was already
finished – is it me or does the lace seem to go faster than the embroidery? She let me unroll it, almost 40″ done on this one piece already. Here you can see how lovely it is. I admit that I wrapped it around myself to see how pretty it was. It was. But that is as close as I am getting to wearing the jacket, it’s not my size.
Tricia
Tags: bobbin, Carolyn, experimental archeology, gold, Lace, Tricia
August 10th, 2008 at 4:20 pm
Each of those repeats takes quite a while….I can only do one in about two hours…..
August 10th, 2008 at 6:49 pm
Having done both, I can say that you can do a repeat in less time than it takes to do any flower, but that doesn’t make it fast. It just means that Carolyn and a team of helpers have made great progress putting in time getting the lace done. Thankfully, in sheer volume the lace is less, as it’s still going to take a chunk of time to get this done and we did start working on it a number of months ago now!
I really love the stitching, but after being set to work on a columbine, making lace is starting to sound really appealing!
Robbin
August 10th, 2008 at 7:01 pm
I hope everyone will be pleased to know that the long piece of lace (pictured in Tricia’s photos) has now grown to a length of 48″. And we have another lacemaker who will put in some hours tomorrow, so who knows what the total length will be by the end of the weekend? We should also have the second wing piece finished.
Speed of lacemaking depends on many things: familiarity of lacemaker with the pattern, complexity of the design, scale of materials are a few. In the case of this lace, the scale is actually relatively large, and the lace is not very complex. Compared to a piece of Binche, or floral Bucks, for instance, it positively flies.
Colleen has mentioned how long it takes her, but I guarantee that after she has spent more time with this lace she will speed up a lot. Right now if I’m not interrupted or distracted, I think it probably takes me around 40 minutes per repeat (a repeat is just under 1″ long). Of course, the amount of time that qualifies as uninterrupted or undistracted is pretty small.
Carolyn
Carolyn