lace | heart | art | 2020

February is a BIG month for love and 14 February 2020 marks the third year that Lenka Suchanek has been running the lace | heart | art challenge and online exhibition, each year the challenge offers a heart pattern for lacemakers to interpret however they wish and fill the world with handmade lace hearts made with love and colour. 

The lace | heart | art challenge was created in memory of Barbara Jean Jones, a young lacemaker who died all too young. Barbara and her mum, Pat attended lace classes at the New School of Lace in 2014. Barbara learned to make lace using both thread and wire and the lace | heart | art challenge was inspired by her favourite design, a half stitch tape heart outline with a diamond plait filling. When Barbara died in the summer of 2016 the group found their weekly lace making classes helped them with their grief and sadness. You can find out more about Barbara’s story from the lace heart art pages on Lenka’s website https://lenkas.com/

I love taking part in these challenges - I love the design process, making something original and sharing your work with the world. I find the design process really intriguing, we are all inspired by different things and we all approach the design process in different ways which are endlessly fascinating. I love that with lace making there is always something new to learn and so many ways we can improve our craft skills.  With the lace heart art challenge, you are given some parameters to work within and it’s entirely up to you what you create. On reflection for the first online competition, I felt I held back with my design, and I since realised that you should always go with your gut feeling and you’ll never regret being bold or going large. What I learned in creating my second and third pieces is that you have to challenge yourself, go with the flow and trust that although you will be faced with dilemmas you will figure it out and you’ll enjoy pushing yourself and the boundaries of this wonderful craft. I’m really excited to share that I won the grand prize in the wire lace category in the lace | heart | art 2020 challenge. For many of us the last few weeks have seen our lives change in sudden and unprecedented ways that none of us could have foreseen before this global pandemic, many of us are in lock down, staying home to stay safe. Movement outside of our homes is restricted to the very essential trips for food and medicine. So it really made my day, week, month, year when I found out earlier week that I had won the grand prize in the wire category for the 2020 competition! The timing of the lace | heart | art exhibition for 2020 is perfect as so many of us are locked down and looking for beauty and joy to distract us from the coronavirus.

The lace heart art team are ahead of the curve in making the challenge and exhibition online so if you take part in the challenge there is no need to send your physical lace away for judging, once you’ve completed your lace you submit photos of your work and you then can hang your lace art on your wall for you to enjoy. 

Check out the amazing lace art at the online exhibitions using these links;

• 1st lace | heart | art exhibition - the challenge was to create a heart with an imaginative ending to the heart tail https://lenkas.com/laceheartart/1st-online-exhibition-2018/ 

• 2nd lace | heart | art exhibition - the challenge was to create a heart incorporating flowers or a bouquet of flowers https://lenkas.com/laceheartart/2nd-online-exhibition-2019/ 

• 3rd lace | heart | art exhibition - the challenge was to create a heart filled with warmth and love, symbolising the sun rays radiate from the center permeating the heart and fill the world with light and colours https://lenkas.com/laceheartart/3rd-online-exhibition-2020/

Coronavirus pandemic permitting those of you in the Metro Vancouver area are in for a real treat in May as the lace heart art team will be sharing the story of Barbara’s Heart and exhibits from the lace | heart | art challenge at the Crescent Beach Pop-up Gallery alongside other original lace works.

Congratulations to everyone who entered the lace heart art challenge 2020. Here’s a selection of some of the lace art from this year’s exhibition

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.

We live in a society where we are lucky enough to be able to purchase our clothes pretty much immediately from a wide range of shops selling an abundance of ready to wear apparel depending on the style and fashion we want to achieve. When our clothes have served there purpose we will pass them onto charity or recycle them. In years gone by it wasn’t so easy and to purchase new clothes you had to go to your tailor, be measured, choose your design and fabric and then wait for your new clothes to be made.

As a result we became very good at recycling, reusing and repurposing clothes. This is one reason why so little lace has survived today. Hand made lace was not cheap and was considered a status swymbol. You would make best use of what you had by moving it from article to article, and repurposing/reshaping it time and time again. This applies to both thread lace and metal lace. Because metal lace was made from precious and expensive metals such as gold and silver and an items usefulness had been served they were melted down and this beautiful work disappeared into the ether.

So how do we study these laces? Many lace researchers use old portraits which often have exquisite detail of laces in fashion at the time the portrait. Rosemary Shepherd’s book ‘An Early Lace Workbox’ is a great resource, Rosemary shares details of her travels around the world and the laces she has studied in museums and portraits to understand how early laces were made.

One of the samples in Rosemary’s book comes from one of Janet Arnold’s ‘Patterns of Fashion’ book. This is a diamond net reconstruction which was originally used to trim the bodice of a gown.

It is a lovely simple sample using picots and plaits to great effect. I have used this sample to create a wire lace pendant using early lace picots. Rosemary’s sample is also created using early lace picots.

My second wire pendant is the same pattern but with modern day picots and some beads added over the roseground.