Sunday 19 February 2017

A lacy weekend

This weekend has been all about bobbin lace.  I mentioned last week that I've been plugging away trying to relearn Bucks Point lace, completing four short samples (in two strips) by Thursday night.


Friday night I spent a couple of hours setting up for sample five, which has a shaped headside, honeycomb rings, and uses two gimps. The Jean Leader book calls it the Plum Pudding pattern.


On Saturday I attended the Fenny Fiddlers Lace Day down in Bletchley, which was quite enjoyable. The ladies on my table were really friendly, and there was lots of chatting during the day while we worked our lace. There was a tombola, some suppliers, a secondhand table (I picked up a box of pins and several reels of thread including some quilting threads), and a raffle where amazingly mine was the first number called and I won a pretty vintage bobbin.  And there was cake.  One of the ladies on my table gave me a lift home, and we stopped in at IKEA in Milton Keynes which was a treat. DH doesn't like IKEA so I don't get to go there very often.

I wore my new Raindrops shawl to the lace day and several people admired it.



Then today was my own lace group meeting, so I worked some more lace in the afternoon. I'm still making mistakes but it is going a lot better.  I want to complete at least a few more samples before I go on the course in late March.

As well as doing some dollshousing this week, I started a new commuter knitting project now that the shawl is finished.  A couple of years ago I lost one of my Selbuvotter gloves and I've been procrastinating about knitting a replacement because I had modded the pattern quite a bit. But I sat down and worked it out and started knitting a new glove this week. I've been really enjoying it. I'd forgotten how much fun it is to knit in two colours, plus it feels good to stop procrastinating.


I also worked out the mesh pattern for the Frisee shawl so after pulling out my failed first attempt at mesh, I'm getting on well with the new section.  It won't look much like mesh until it's blocked. This is a bottom-up shawl - I started with the lightest gradient (of five) and I am now on the third colour.


No sewing this week although I did cut out a bunch more 10.5 inch squares last week and I have quite a stack of them now.  I've also been reading the instructions for the toadstool pincushion kit I bought a while back and trying to decide if I really want to make it.  It's cute but I'm not sure I would actually use it.

It was a nice day today so we took down the Christmas lights from the trees in the morning, and I have a nice scratch on my arm from the pyracantha bush to prove it. We also built a little drystone retaining wall in the front and started wheelbarrowing dirt dug up from our future patio around to the front garden to level outside the very wavy and sloping strip of lawn on that side. Once it's more level then I will re-seed with shade tolerant grass seed and hopefully it won't look so rubbish in future.

I hope you've had a nice week too.

1 comment:

swooze said...

Your lace looks really nice.

I wonder who's walking around wearing your one lost glove? It's a shame you lost it but I'm glad you still have the materials to make its replacement.