Fragments of Family

On Monday afternoon I went round to my grandparents house so my gran could teach me how to make pillow/bobbin lace. It's important to me to learn how to make traditional bobbin lace because it's a craft which has been being handed down through my family and is deeply rooted in the Belgian flank of my ancestry, so for it to stop seems ridiculous considering the applications I could use it in.

Gran has also, very kindly, honoured me with a Belgian Lace Pillow & Continental Bobbins which were made by my great, great grandfather & was used by my great gran until she was in her 90's. It still has her last piece on it which makes it even more poignant. Though one in the photos above are actually of my grans lace pillow, which is similar to granny grans but was made by her father (N.B.: I may be getting my greats and great great grandparents muddled in relation to who made the pillows, but you get the jist - they're old, handmade & full of history).

Anyway, for the past week I've been trying to master the basic stitches which are used to make more ornate designs and from the above picture I took on Monday, I've made a 15cm piece of lace using: cloth stitch, cloth stitch & twist and half stitch. Which I unpinned a couple of nights ago to start a new piece - hand winding the bobbins being a complete pain - and gran thinks I'm doing really well when I showed her it.

I've turned back into an excited child with doing this and keep making my mum come and look at what I've done! But it is exciting because it's part of our heritage, plus it's suitably handsy/fiddly for my liking and has stopped me knitting for a few days - knitting post to come at some point.

My lack of making since Christmas has made my brain stagnate a bit, well, a lot. Though I reassured to hear from one of my friends, a wonderful artist & fellow blogger that she's been feeling equally despairing and lost since finishing university. This in itself isn't a good thing, in fact it's down right bad because I don't want my friend feeling that way, however, it does make me feel less ridiculous for my designers block.

The lace however, I think has started to give my designer self a bit of a jump start and my friend pointed out that a blog should be about sharing the whole process, not just the final pieces. That's what my portfolio site is for. So I'm going to try and be a better blogger.

"Honest to blog!"

Too Soft!

Got around to doing some resin samples this morning, but didn't clock the fact that I had miss-measured one of the batches of hardener until a couple of hours ago. So, half have set, half haven't...and none of them want to come out of the new moulds I bought. Typically one horrific chain of supermarkets silicon ice cube trays are indeed superior to another.

Fortunately however, I know that the thing I was trying to set will work and look good and I can get on with a few idea! Hurrah!

I'm quite enjoying making resin samples of colours and different pigmenting agents. Or in other words working out what I can (a) buy on the cheap or (b) find in the house and given my hardener has started to become increasingly more yellow (it must be two years old by now!) I may as well use it up experimenting or on opaque work. I did the above samples at Christmas using mostly soft artists pastels ground up using a pestle and mortar and glitter. What can I say? I'm a girl and I like glitter! Anyway, today's experiments included loose tea after being inspired by designer Claire Lowe, and gel food colouring as an alternative to transparent resin pigments. The main samples I'll keep secret until I can work them into a design because they go with a particular piece of poetry etc. But on the others, the gel colouring works really well as an alternative to the expensive dyes and I only used the tip of a straw and this over pigmented my samples. They cost about £15 from Lakeland and that's less than most of the dyes I found for resin - plus you get to make yummy things like this:

Not resin, obviously, and I wouldn't recommend using them for baking if you're re-dipping your resin sticks, but if you aren't, these are yummy. I'm slightly obsessed with making proper French Macarons at the moment, these aren't todays attempt, they're the last ones and I just prefer the colour combination even if the new batch look more like macarons.

Anyway, instead of whinging about the resin not working, I'm going to put it back on my shelf out of harms way, give it until the morning to see if it'll set and go have a nice treat and enjoy that something did go right today!