Today’s world is fast paced and full of conflict or at least thats how I feel quite a lot of the time! There’s a demand to be “on” all the time and keep up with the steady stream of emails hitting our inboxes, to keep up with the steady stream of information we are bombarded with, to keep up with our never ending to do lists so it’s no wonder we all feel a little overwhelmed at times.

My antidote to this is to loose myself in my lace! Making lace is my therapy -  bobbin lace is mostly a combination of twists and crosses and the patterns are repetitive so it’s easy to loose yourself in a lace pattern, the repetitive action of twisting and crossing threads or wire is very meditative.  It doesn’t matter if the pattern is simple or more technical, when you are making lace you have to focus solely on what you are creating and be completely in the moment. There is no room for screens when you are in the zone or flow of creating. That’s not to say I don’t enjoy watching TV or a good box set whilst I’m making lace but you can’t look at your phone or laptop if your hands are full of bobbins and pins!  

Making lace can also help with our tendencies towards perfection. Because we are human we will make mistake even after we have completed our 10,000 hours and become so-called experts in an area. The interesting thing about mistakes in craft work is that we tend to notice our mistakes when it’s unlikely no one else will. When you are making lace if you notice you’ve made a mistake you have two options, you could go back to fix the mistake or you could just decide to live with it. When you go backwards in thread lace you have the potential to weaken the thread which might lead to issues further on with threads snapping. When making bobbin lace with wire you have less options if you make a mistake as wire isn’t very forgiving at being reworked. If you do choose to reverse your wire you will need to gently straighten out your wire as kinks are made in the wire as you make lace. You need to consider reverse lace in wire very carefully as the wire you’ve gently manipulated will always be a little more fragile and prone to breaking. Often it’s not worth going backwards in wire and you learn to embrace and celebrate your mistakes and with time and practice you will find that you make less mistakes and you find ways to solve problems that come up.

We all want to create perfect works, but some of the most interesting hand made works aren’t perfect, and we love them for that very reason.  We mustn’t let our search for perfection hold us back from making stuff.

As part of Jane Atkinson’s exhibition Ebb n Flow, Jane organised a number of workshops for a host of international lace artists such as; Pierre Fouche, Denise Watts, Ann Allison, Lauran Sundin.

Lauran Sundin creates beautiful and unique pieces of statement jewellery using gold and silver wire and I was lucky enough to attend Lauran’s wire lace workshop.

Garden Party - one of Lauran’s masterpieces (Photo courtesy of Lauran Sundin)

We had a great weekend learning wire lace techniques from Lauran and seeing Lauran’s “ballet fingers” in action. One of a Lauran’s favourite sayings is “if you never make anything you’ll never make a mistake “ a good mantra to live by, whatever you choose to do in life.

At the end of our first day we were treated to a personal tour of Jane’s Ebb n Flow exhibition. It was lovely to hear where the inspiration for the exhibition came from and learn about Jane’s design process. On display with the exhibition pieces were some of Jane’s sketchbooks which showed how each design was created.

The Walford Mill was a great location and the learning loft was a lovely space to spend the weekend and was very well equipped with everything we needed.

There are three spring celebrations in the Celtic year; Imbolc, Ostara and Beltane. Ostara is the midpoint the celebrations taking place between 16/03 and 23/03. This is the time when light and darkness are in balance with light on the rise. New seasons are the opportunity for fresh starts and new beginnings. What does any of this have to do with wire lace jewellery you may ask?

Much like our natural world I’ve been hibernating through the winter, hunkering down making lots of lace and plans for my new creative venture, I’ve been busy designing and creating products and working on a seemingly endless list of things to do. I’m excited to say that the opening of my online Etsy shop has now become a reality.

There’s so many things happening at the moment as I make this idea a reality; I’ve sorted my business name, my logo is nearly done, my website is being rebranded, I’m sourcing packaging and I’m finalising my product designs.

I’m not sure how this will go, My goal is to build a slow and sustainable creative business, Making beautiful bobbin lace takes time. It’s just me making my jewellery and there are only so many hours in the day.

I realise I have to build a customer base and that’s not going to be easy. I am under no illusion that any of this will be easy, but this is something I feel I have to do, I want to create beautiful pieces of wearable art that people want to own as well as contributing to keeping bobbin lacemaking alive and thriving.

I am sure there will be days when everything feels hard, and days when I might want to give up, there always are, with anything in life especially a new venture. I’m going to try and stay positive and focused, taking each day as it comes. I might need to pivot so that plans I’m making now might need to be tweaked. In spite of all that I’m really excited by my new venture. This is an opportunity for my designs to make someone feel special.

So this is me giving this a shot, I’m looking forward to sharing my work with you and hearing your feedback.

The Ebb ‘n’ Flow exhibition was a spectacular story of climate change depicted in a number of lace panels created by Lace artist Jane Atkinson. The exhibition was held at the Walford Mill and Priest’s House in Wimborne.

Jane’s panels depict many different elements of nature some feel familiar such as flowers, trees and birds.

Other aspects are more unexpected such as oxygen bubbles and ice. I hadn’t really give oxygen bubbles much thought until I saw Jane’s four panels Oxygen 1 - 4 which captures the bubbles of life so beautifully.

Jane was inspired by her daily walks through nature to create many of the pieces in this exhibition, and she has used her art to give us a very personal and intimate view of the changes she has seen, and this is relatable to us all as we are all seeing similar events and the impact of climate change in our local areas and homes.

I loved how the exhibition had been assembled and how some of the pieces were hung from the ceiling so you could walk in between them and others were framed within acrylic/perspex.

The catalogue accompanying this exhibition is beautifully produced and as well as containing detailed notes for each piece, explaining the inspiration for them contains good quality photographs of each piece. I loved the ‘Healing the planet’ suggestions at the bottom of each page which were interesting and sobering. One read that “3° of global warming, raising the sea by 2m, would devastate capital cities worldwide. Coal burning must stop, but Dorset rejected a 970 MW coastal wind farm in 2015.”

Other lace artists work was also on display at the Mill including Lauran Sundin, Denise Watts and Ann Allison.