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.
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