Networking

Day 47: Although we speak the same language, I could bet that what you mean by "networking" is something entirely different than I mean by the same term. Having played around with making a couple of simple bags and a snood, I decided it was time to up my game with the challenge of clustered stitches in a dainty doily. Despite appearances, I do have a "pink and fluffy" side, and it manifests largely in a love of lace, whether knitted, crocheted, tatted, made with bobbins, woven or otherwise. However, the days of antimacassars and jabots have passed, and lace-work is seldom seen in homes or on garments, and certainly not to the extent it was employed in the 1800s and earlier. Lace-making, it would appear, is a dying craft, too time-consuming for the hurried, busy lifestyles of modern times. It must be said that lace demands hours from its creators, and substantial after-care in laundering, starching, pinning and drying. Yet to me, lace is art and, as such, adds elegance to any setting, even one as down-to-earth as my rural home.

Netted Snood

Day 37: This one's for the mediaevalists out there (and you know who you are). I only recently discovered detailed instructional material for making netted lace (something I've wanted to add to my repertoire of needlearts for at least fifty years). I played around with making simple bags for a bit, and then wanted to advance to a level where the end product stops being a net and begins being true lace by virtue of having a more textural design. Although this is generally executed as filet embroidery (adding surface threads to a base net), texture can also be incorporated into the net itself by making increases and decreases in the structure. I opted for simple clusters. These are made by putting two stitches in two adjacent loops in one row to produce four loops, and then joining those four loops in the next row. An increase of one loop at the center of each sequence must be made in the third row if the piece is to maintain a uniform diameter, and then one plain row is worked in order to be in the right position to begin another cluster. Snoods are known from the Bronze Age onward, and were most commonly worn by women during the Middle Ages and Renaissance. They were often made from metallic fibers and frequently incorporated pearls or other gems into the lace.

A New Skill

Day 365: By the time I was 18, I had mastered enough of the most common fiber-arts that I was hired as the sole needlework consultant by a fabric-store chain on the east coast, but I was always looking to expand my knowledge base. Of course in those days, the internet was not a "thing," and books were the next best option to individual instruction. I did learn to tat from a co-worker, but two other potential skills intrigued me: bobbin lace and netting. I had no idea where to obtain the supplies for either. A few years later, I took a class in bobbin-lace making and found a supplier for bobbins and thread through the instructor. However, I was unable to find netting needles and gauges anywhere, and all thoughts of netting moved to the back shelf of my mind until recently when I stumbled across a video about it on YouTube, never mind that it covered fishing nets as opposed to lace. The principle is the same, but on a much different scale. I bought a cheap kit containing needles, shuttles and gauges and settled down to make my first swatch of net. I'm still quite clumsy at it and keep catching the thrown loop of the "Flying Dutchman" knot around my little finger more often than not, but the squares/diamonds of my net are uniform in size. For now, I'm working with #20 crochet cotton, but will move to finer threads once I'm entirely comfortable with the technique. Or maybe I'll go fishing.