Teneriffe

I've been interested on and off in teneriffe lace for a while now. I thought it looked cool and looked fun to make, but I didn't go out and bought a book either. A while back I realized that Alexandra Stillwell was generous enough to allowe her book The Technique of Teneriffe Lace to be posted on the Arizona lace website. I downloaded the book, flipped through it for a while and decided to take the plunge. (For those of you that aren't familiar with the Arizona website, it's fantastic! It's mostly bobbin lace, but there are some other laces as well. A wonderful resource of old lace publications/books.)

Here is my first little motif. The instructions are pretty clear and for the most part easy to follow. The lace is fun to make too! It works quickly, especially this first pattern which does not have anything too complicated.

There is supposed to be a round of interlacing in there, but it looks absolutely horrible in my sample. I think the problem was the base I had decided to use to stretch the web. I found an old cork thing, which I thought would be good. In retrospect, it was probably a bad idea. First of all, getting the pins into the cork was a bit difficult to say the least. I thought my needle lace pillow was bad, but that was a piece of cake compared to the cork! I literally had to pound the pins in with a hammer. Now I like playing with tools and all, but somehow I don't think a hammer is normally part of lace making equipment:) Needless to say there was absolutely no flexibility once the web was stretched. It worked well for the rounds of knots, but when it came time to do the interlacing, I just couldn't do it. There wasn't enough give between the pairs of threads. (I know how to do interlacing - I did some when I went through my drawn-thread embroidery phase, so I know it wasn't me.) I snapped my thread twice trying to get the pairs to interlace properly - quite a feat when working with size 20 thread! If I remake the motif, I will see if I can leave some slack when stretching the web.

When I pulled out the pins to remove the motif from the background, I had to use needle pliers. That doesn't sound right either...

Other than that, I am pleased with my first sample of teneriffe lace. It's not the prettiest thing in the world, and I need to work on the tension, but it was fun to make. I need to come up with a better "pillow" or some other background, because I don't think the cork is cutting it. I don't really want to stretch it out on fabric though. All in all though, I am definitely looking forward to making more teneriffe lace.

And no, I haven't done enough reading to really know the difference between teneriffe/sol/nanduti laces. Since the book I am using is called Technique of Teneriffe, that's what I will be calling my lace.