Blogs

I've been experimenting with renaissance bobbin-lace, slowly accumulating patterns and techniques. I'm making preliminary notes for most of the patterns I try here. From time to time, I do a more extensive write-up of a particular pattern, and give it its own page.

My very first piece was done with Lady Ginevra's gentle and skillful supervision, and Southron Gaard's first String Day (a one-day textiles-workshop). Ginevra showed Caterine and I the basic stitches, and lent us her bobbins and pillows for long enough to complete a small piece. Wonderful!

Several members of the Barony are excited by bobbin-lace at the moment, so I'm compiling a the resources we've found most useful here.

Digital Archive of Documents Related to Lace

A fabulous collection of primary and secondary resources: facsimiles of renaissance pattern books, scans of 19th C histories of lace, modern articles on lace and lace making, etc.

Especially useful are:

One puzzle of Meyer's rapier treatise is that he frequently refers to a position called "Straight Parrying [gerade Versatzung]", especially in part two of the treatise, despite the fact that it is not listed as a guard in Chapter 3.  It is defined in the Dusack treatise as follows:

Stand with your right foot forward and hold your dusack in front of you with your arm extended, so that your long edge stands toward the opponent and the tip of your weapon is forward...

I wanted to try bobbin lace, but didn't want to order bobbins or spend a long time making an elaborate pillow until I was sure it was something I'd do more than a few inches of.

Several members of the group have bought silk thread from Fibreholics, a weaving supplier in Kaitaia. Each cone of thread is quite expensive ($35-$50), but as there's over a kilometre on a cone it's significantly cheaper by the metre than embroidery silks, or even crochet cotton.

Update: Many of these are now available in much smaller, cheaper rolls - $6-$12 for 10grams. That's still a lot more than in a skein of embroidery thread.

We tend to buy different colours, so we can swap. So far, we have:

Class:  A set of exercises demonstrating aspects of Meyer's footwork.

Warm-up: For a change, Nicola lead up through a few minutes of Scottish dancing around the room.

Cutting exercises: Meyer's example of six cuts for Dusack (described previously) going forwards and backwards (cut on the back foot when going backwards).  An example of stopping a cut and switching to the other side (adapted from Dusack):

Early experiments in brocaded tablet weaving part II:

Pattern 85 from  Anna Neuper's Modelbuch.

*Update*

I added a photo of the second repeat so you can see what it's supposed to be like.

9 tablets, 20 row repeat.

About an hour of weaving - I actually prefer the wider bands, I just hate cutting out the cards.

After putting up the last band I managed to get a thicker jap thread from The Ribbon Rose

Early experiments in brocaded tablet weaving:

Pattern 85 from  Anna Neuper's Modelbuch.

9 tablets, 20 row repeat.

about 1.5 hours of weaving, I was on a voice call to someone so I was working fairly slowly.

Here you can get an idea of the pattern as it came out and the pattern as given in the book.

A brief review of basics of Meyer's rappier: stance, footwork, some basic attacks and defences.

Reviewed Meyer's six cuts example (from dusack): Zornhau right, Mittelhau left, Unterhau right, Unterhau left, Mittelhau right, Scheitelhau.

Yep, it was thrill-a-minute with Kotek deftly wielding a hammer and redoing the rivets on some armour he'd been sent. I would say excuse the pun, but what I really hope is that I have you all groaning in your seats as you read. I should have been a herald.

In addition to this worthy endeavour, he also showed off some German sleeves he has been working on - nice spiffy ones, all the better for fighting in.