Bobbin Lace and Other Hobbies

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You Asked for my Design Process - Part One - The idea

Everyone has their own ways of finding inspiration for designs and following it through to a finished piece of lace, this odd way has worked well for me on occasion. 

Insomnia plays a part.  To stop my mind being restless at night when sleep isn't an option, I  give it something to do.  I send myself off on a favourite walk, taking in the details of trees and flowers in the hedgerows, or have a wander around a town I haven't seen for years, or listen to the waves of a long ago seaside visit, smelling the sea, and feeling the heat of a long gone sun on my shoulders.  

Pain ups the game.  Sometimes more concentration is called for, so I turn to figuring out the construction of a dream house, or how to best cut fabric for a new patchwork quilt and the order of sewing,  or how to make a new shape of pincushion.

When it is obvious I am in for a long, unsleeping night, I have to give my imagination a longer project to chew on.  Lacemaking is good option because of all the different aspects of a new design.  Sometimes I get the completed design nearly straight away, maybe I had been thinking about one and I just needed brain space to visualise the finished lace

I flash up a drawing, a shape, and pull and push it about as though I have a pencil and paper.  I fill it with lace, what edge does it have?  The edge depends on the filling, so what filling suits the shape?  

It looks like a fish, so needs a smooth edge, a two pair will do nicely and  'festoon' would make lovely scale shapes, but I need a bigger body to give that stitch enough room, it will have to be more of a cartoon fish than a realistic shape then.  Maybe I could attach some sequins inside each of the scales or just add tiny seed beads along where the picots should sit?  Let's see if that is possible. 

Ping! Now I am using pale bobbins, not sure why, just the ones I tend to go for at night, though I don't have a set of pale bobbins in awake time! Handy to not have to wind them each time though, and always the right colours just where I need them.

I don't seem to need a pillow or pins with unasleep lace making. I can flip the piece over or rub out a section that didn't work, add a new bit and carry on.  The crochet hook sewings never snags the thread, bobbins stay in order unsecured,  but I still have to make sure that each bobbin has the same length thread, I do like them neat!

I abandoned festoon, I think Honeycomb would suit better and I do like making it because it has a gentle dance when being worked.  Let's see if the sequins will fit inside the centers... the threads and sequin work themselves up in the air, a bit like 3D 'Fantasia', having a few tries till it all slips nicely into place and the sequin is tensioned in the center, I will have to remember how I did that when it comes time to make it for real.

The finished fishes are all over the place, colours, sequins, beads, I made some of them longer, some rounder, give them different tails, wonder what they would look like if I embroidered them instead, would they translate into applique?   

What if I used just one body shape and used differenent laces to fill them?  A practice piece to see how fillings can alter the look of one simple shape?  I draw a curve, mirror it and there is the body, a few different tails, little fins added on and now to try different fillings... 

Ping! there they are, a bit of sequin ground, a bit of tape lace with beads and shiny thread, a few tallies of course, stubby tail, long tail, and big sequin eyes on blue, pink and gold fish.  I drew them for real the following morning and put a few of them in the computer for printing onto blue card.




Of course, this is 'just' the design idea, the making of an actual pattern and making all the real lace pieces is a much more laborious task and I will detail that process at another time.