Archives for posts tagged ‘Ulrike Voelcker’

U1: Finally Finished

Saturday, 3 January 2009

After a busy period when I needed the portability of needlelace, I’m back at my lace pillow making Chantilly. U1 (from Ulrike Voelcker’s Grammar of Point Ground) is finally done. Here I’m applying the starching agent which happens to be liquid hairspray. I brush it on lightly, trying to avoid buildup that would cause the dried hairspray to collect in the holes of the lace like glass in a window pane. One application is probably enough, but I put on two.



The finished lace is 9-1/4 inches/23.5 cm long and took me an estimated 56 hours, about 50 hours for the actual lacemaking and about 6 for the set up (bobbin winding, preparing the pricking) and finishing (tieing and cutting off threads, taking out pins, starching). I’m a pretty slow lacemaker, but I’m probably underestimating the setup and finishing times.

Here’s a scan of the finished lace.

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Chantilly Workshop with Ulrike Voelcker

Sunday, 17 August 2008

I’m back from the three-day Chantilly workshop with Ulrike Voelcker. On July 19, I started my practice piece for this workshop with a copy of Ulrike’s new technique book, The Grammar of Point Ground, in hand. Here’s what it looked like with the ground just started.

By the morning of August 9, it looked like this.



I finished it later that afternoon. In doing so, I used up both my boxes of fine silk pins and had to pull some from the beginning ground to finish the piece. There are over 1,000 in there!



Of course I needed those pins for the workshop the next day, so I took the block with the lace on it with me to rest in the pins overnight before pulling them out for the class. (There are different opinions about whether keeping the lace in the pins for a while really does anything to “set” the lace. Preferring to err on the side of caution, I didn’t want to yank them out right away.)


The workshop was at the same time exhausting and exhilarating. Ulrike knows the lace to its core and demanded that we make the best lace possible.


These is some of the Chantilly lace she brought for us to see. (Chantilly lace is pronounced as in the French—shon-tee-YEE.)



How much lace did I make in three days? A little less than 2 inches. (Photos of the unpinned workshop lace to follow.) I learned a lot, but it’s good to be home.

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