{"id":2833,"date":"2020-05-11T16:35:15","date_gmt":"2020-05-11T16:35:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/survivalarchitecture.com\/shuttlesmithblog\/?p=2833"},"modified":"2020-05-11T16:35:17","modified_gmt":"2020-05-11T16:35:17","slug":"the-lace-reader-book-club-opportunities-to-educate-about-lace","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/survivalarchitecture.com\/shuttlesmithblog\/the-lace-reader-book-club-opportunities-to-educate-about-lace\/","title":{"rendered":"The Lace Reader + Book Club = Opportunities to Educate about LACE"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Several years ago I finally joined the neighborhood women’s book club. I will have to profess that in the last 20-30 years I have not been much of a reader. First and foremost, I spend my available free time either tatting, creating needlelace, teaching fiber art techniques, and\/or designing\/laying out\/publishing my books. Keep in mind that I work full-time. But with the realization that I’m an empty-nester, I decided that it was time for me to expand my horizons via reading and what better way than to join a book club. In addition to the stimulation that reading a book gives me, the book club gave me a way to keep in touch with the neighborhood women. And as an added bonus, the get togethers feature goodies of wine and yummy snacks!!! For a long time, I wouldn’t even consider choosing a book for the group to read (they were all experienced readers, whereas I was new to reading). That was until I went to The Sunflower Lacemakers biannual lacemaking retreat and one of the members mentioned that they had found & joined a book club because she had been invited as a ‘lacemaking expert’ while the were reading\/discussing a lace related book. This got me to thinking…’what if I used a lace related book to introduce my form of relaxation\/interest (lace and lacemaking) to my book-reading friends’?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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So I read 2 different books: The Lacemakers Daughter<\/em><\/strong> by Diane Keziah Robertson & The Lace Reader<\/em><\/strong> by Brumonia Barry. I asked one of the book club members to read both to help choose the most appropriate book for the group and she chose the latter one–The Lace Reader<\/em><\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I set out a plan to utilize this opportunity to introduce these ‘readers’ to the world of lace. I have a collection of lace acquired through the years in various ways. Some pieces were collected because of my active study of the type: Romanian Point, Teneriffe, Nanduti. Some were ‘rescued’ from antique and thrift shops, some were gifts, etc. None of my pieces are extremely rare or expensive. But all are loved & appreciated. I filled my dining room table with representative pieces of different forms of lace including my own tatting, various needlelace types, bobbin lace, knitted, crocheted and machine lace.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Lower left: machine-made lace. Upper left & lower right: bobbin lace. Upper right: Teneriffe\/Nanduti Lace<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Lower left: Netted Lace. Swan: Carrickmacross Lace (my design\/work). Pile of tatting. My tatting books. Romanian Point Lace. Filet Lace. Knitted lace.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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White piece: Knotted lace (Armenian?). Colored: Nanduti. Black: Teneriffe Lace. Storage bins of my collection.
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In addition to my collection of lace, I asked my beautiful lacemaking friend, Jennifer Bartling to come in & demonstrate bobbin lacing technique. In the book, The Lace Reader<\/b><\/i>, the characters did bobbin lacemaking. Jennifer drove over 30 miles one way to help me educate my bookclub friends about lacemaking. I regretfully do not have a photo of her demonstrating…..I was too busy that night being a hostess: food, wine, welcoming my guests, as well as giving a verbal\/visual tutorial about what is lace, lace types, etc.. I didn’t take the time to take photographs of Jennifer as she was demonstrating. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

To my knowledge, I didn’t find any willing recruits wanting to learn a lacemaking or fiber art technique, at least I did try to educate about lace and lacemaking. In the past I used to take tatting and needlelace-making techniques into a ‘cross-stitch’ festival\/teaching environment. It was again my attempt to sway ‘cross-stitchers’ into becoming ‘tatters’ or ‘lacemakers’. But I will have to tell you that despite my best efforts, I have come to realize that for the most part, one’s first hobby (reading in the book club group; cross-stitching in the needlework show group) is usually where they choose to stay.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Lace Reader<\/em><\/strong> has a complex enough story line that even the most advanced readers of the book club were sufficiently amused. The victim of the book was a lacemaker who was also a ‘lace reader’. She would hold up a piece of lace in front of a person and read their ‘fortune’. I had never heard of a ‘lace reader’ even though I have been in\/around the lacemaking world for a long time (several decades). I did some research on the internet and the only reference to such a thing kept coming back to this book. Thus I believe that the author make it up–a fictional thing for a fictional book.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Several years ago I finally joined the neighborhood women’s book club. I will have to profess that in the last 20-30 years I have not been much of a reader. First and foremost, I spend my available free time either tatting, creating needlelace, teaching fiber art techniques, and\/or designing\/laying out\/publishing my books. Keep in mind … Continue reading The Lace Reader + Book Club = Opportunities to Educate about LACE<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2833","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/survivalarchitecture.com\/shuttlesmithblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2833","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/survivalarchitecture.com\/shuttlesmithblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/survivalarchitecture.com\/shuttlesmithblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/survivalarchitecture.com\/shuttlesmithblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/survivalarchitecture.com\/shuttlesmithblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2833"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/survivalarchitecture.com\/shuttlesmithblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2833\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2973,"href":"https:\/\/survivalarchitecture.com\/shuttlesmithblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2833\/revisions\/2973"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/survivalarchitecture.com\/shuttlesmithblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2833"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/survivalarchitecture.com\/shuttlesmithblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2833"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/survivalarchitecture.com\/shuttlesmithblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2833"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}