Making Lace: Elvish Robe
So long story short i decided that in the new year i would start, not one but two, big projects. this is just the first one. Now that doesn’t mean that work is just going to pick up on January 1st. No no, it has honestly started like... 3 weeks ago I am just getting to the point where I have enough to make a post about it.
I have to start with research so that I know what I am doing. So the first thing I looked in to was how to make lace. There are a fair few ways to make lace actually. There are 4 different ways to make lace that I am aware of.
Methods of Lace making: 1. Bobbin Lace, this has been historically popular. I do not have the materials to make bobbin lace (a pillow and bobbins). As I am unfamiliar with the techniques I set this one aside 2. Needle lace. This is done with a ball point needle and some lace tape. Again I am not to familiar with how it is done or the techniques required to make it. Though i did learn that the House of Worth was big on this lace technique back in the day. Pretty neat. 3. Knitting lace. At the time of my choice of method to make the robe I didn’t have the needles required to make lace this way. However with the amount of work that I have to do I decided not to make the robe using this method. 4. Crochet Lace, or Irish lace. So some history about Irish lace. It became super popular in Ireland during the potato famine for women to learn how to make crochet lace as a form of income. Irish lace can be done in a follow a pattern method or in a more of a free style way. Make a mesh lace backdrop in the shape you need or place or motifs the way you want them and then connect them as needed with a crochet method. I will be making the robe in this method for the ease of my sanity. Next, can clothes be made from Lace? The simple answer is yes. People do it all the time, gloves, hats, veils, scarves. I didn’t know if it could be done for something the scale of a robe though. So with the help of some lovely people i have met in the last month (thank you crochet crisis) I have found some pretty interesting old school books and low and behold I found these gems.
Now looking at these if it can be done for these it can be done for a robe. I was super excited to see these. The book these beauties can be found is is here. There is obviously more in the book but these are the two things that excited me the most. It proved that it could be done! The Robe plan: I have a plan. Kind of. Okay not really but it is something of a plan. I will be taking a robe sewing pattern (one that I haven not selected yet.) And use that as my base for the lace robe. It has to be long i want it touching the floor. I will make border lace and use it to surround each block of the sewing pattern. I will fill the section with a mesh of my choice and then attach my motifs.
Motifs: Ideally i will be using a lot of flowers, leaf's, butterflies and moths. Extreme detail is something that elves strive for in most if not all settings. They live long lives wouldn’t they make things as detailed as they can. I want a lot of the imagery I am using to be of nature. Other notes: So apparently there is this stuff called Crochet Thread. This is for making lace. Cotton lace that is as I don’t think I have found anything for Crochet thread in silk or wool. This is smaller then lace weight yarn. Apparently the smaller you get the smaller your motifs. Not surprising really. The smaller your thread the more of it that has to go into your work. I think I will be doing this Project in lace weight yarn. I haven’t decided yet but really it will come down to cost over time really, or I guess once I decided on colours (because yes we can make this colourfull) or just white i can buy things in bulk.
Stay tuned for more my lovely apprentices!