I've Almost Got It

It was another long day of schooling. The poor child has four different papers she has to write before the end of the school year and writing is probably her least favorite thing to do, after math of course. I've been spending much of the day upstairs with her to provide support and keep her on task. Luckily I can take the bobbin lace with me, so I worked on that all day. In this first picture here are some of the pieces I got done over the weekend. I was pretty proud of the way all of them are coming out now. I think along with the weight from the spangles, I got the match between the size of the pattern and the size of the thread giving me the right balance of negative and positive space.

The last challenge before I was going to try the square border, was this sampler style one. It started from a point which I completely botched the first go around mostly because I hadn't grasped the concept of twisting the thread together at the beginning. The illustration in the book made it seem like a complicated maneuver. I was drastically over thinking it. I also had problems coming and going from the zig zag last time. I would leave off bobbins in all the wrong spots making the next batch of the pattern not work right at all. I'm proud to say that this time everything ended up in the right spots.

After that was off the board, I started prepping for the big piece again. Someone had asked if bobbin lace was slower than tatting and though my experience is quite limited, there is at the very least, much more prep work for it. Pricking out the pattern and winding all the bobbins takes quite some time. I barely got started with the new piece before it was dinner time. I'm also, definitely still making mistakes on the big one. There are just so many elements bumped right up next to each other that I'm still playing the 'which bobbin where?' game. I'm already off to a better start though, so here's to getting through more of it today while the child continues writing paper and we all hide from the too hot sun for the day.