Cattern Lace

So it was the monthly meeting of my lace group on Saturday- in theory, 5 hours to spend getting on with making lace, visiting the supplier and seeing what everyone else has on their pillow. Except it didn’t quite work out like that. Most of the usual organisers were on holiday so I ended up having to get people signed up for a workshop, introducing and thanking the speaker (a very funny and slightly risqué vicar…) and keeping the lovely suppliers topped up with tea. So I managed about 10 minutes of lace, but it was just enough time to finish the Wild Rose:

Ignore the slightly leaf-shaped leadworks in the middle- if I aim for leaves I get leadworks and vice versa…. And here it is next to a paper clip so you get an idea of scale:

I can’t quite believe that something so small took near enough two months- but at the rate of 10 minutes every session, it’s perhaps hardly surprising.

I was also surprised, and slightly depressed by the supplier saying that we are one of the younger lace groups she visits. There were around 30 of us there on Saturday; I’m in my mid-thirties and was the youngest by at least ten years. And at least 20 of the others were over 65, with many now being too old, or their eye-sight is too bad to even do any lace anymore. She said most groups she visits are all in their 80s- so what does that mean for 10 or 15 years time?? There was such a big resurgence of lace-making in the 1980s but it seems to have tailed off again now in most areas- with some notable exceptions, like Devon and Japan. So come on, get your bobbins out! Give it a go if you’ve not tried it before- I’ll shortly be posting some tutorials to get even the novice started off. Lace-making may be quite old-fashioned and not exactly the hippest craft on the block, but it’s part of our heritage and a great way to spend some time- even if you’ve only got 10 minutes…