Tally Practice

After my last effort with tallies I decided I needed more practice as well as some help. So I tottered off for a lesson with a reputable lace teacher. I wanted to have a lesson on tallies, and not waste precious lesson time on working plaits to get to the tallies, so found another design in another book that was just about all tallies. Yippee! OK, there were two footsides and one plait but I thought that would be easy enough, so I set about making the pricking & setting up the lace ready for my lesson.

Mmm............. how did I start this piece of lace? Back to the book, no help there. OK, so author assumes only experienced lace makers want to use their books. Not so, but I still had a problem & needed to solve it. So I just "had a go" and have no idea what I did. I was OK with the footsides, but it was the tally/plait junction that had me stumped. All of a sudden I discoverd something called "6 pr crossings", now that was new! So were the picots on both sides of the plait. Now did I say this piece of lace was going to be easy?

So, my easy piece of lace that was going to give me lots of practice with tallies, also gave me lessons in other lace techniques as well. My tallies have definately improved, I have learnt that there is more than one way to do a 6 pr crossing, twisted picots on the right are worked different than twisted picots on the left (& yes I need to practice those to get rid of the "rabbit ears", I learnt about "cluny crossings" rather than traditional Bedfordshire crossings, the fact that I need to concentrate when doing footsides on both sides, and that I need to think about the start of a desgin & change it if necessary.

Ah......... so much to think about, but at the ned of the day my tallies did improve, and that was the aim of the exercise. I wonder what I will learn with the next piece.