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Crochet Lace

Posted in Uncategorized on 01/21/2011 08:09 pm by admin

Crochet Lace
What color should be best for a room where I will be teaching crochet and bobbin-lace?

The room has a big window and is painted right now in an apple green shade. I want the room to be cheerful and inspiring color. What do you suggest?

Because these fiber arts require good vision, any colors that help people do the work visually will be good. So, light colors are almost mandatory (dark accents and furniture are OK, if you want them). And calming colors that are "easy on the eyes" are good choices, too.

Depending on how bright the "apple green" is, it may be beautiful to work in as is. If it's too bright, you could tone it down with nothing more than a "sponging" of thinned-down white or cream paint. (You use a sponge to apply the paint, "bouncing" the sponge all over the wall to come up with an irregular coat of the cover-color.)

The "dusty" colors from the 80s and 90s would also be great for working in, though they may look a little too dated for your tastes. Do you remember the sage greens and dusty pinks and muted blues of that time? You'd probably be best off with the palest shades of one or two of these, if this is the way you choose to go.

White and cream are the absolute best for reflecting the most available light. They have the other advantage of going with every other color, so you can paint trim and/or choose drapes and furnishings colors in the "lively" color, and change these whenever you want.

If you feel *really* ambitious, you could try this: paint the walls a medium color, such as a dull medium-blue. Then use white paint to hand-draw a "lace edging" design over the upper one-quarter to one-third of the wall. You use an artists' brush, not a flat paintbrush.

The easiest way to draw lace is to paint the shape of the lace's border parallel to the cornice molding, at the depth below it that you want. You may want to make a straight edge, or scalloped, or van-dyked (pointy scallops, essentially), or whatever. Then, between the edge and the ceiling, fill the whole strip with cross-hatching (which ends up looking like the ground stitch in bobbin lace).

When that dries, then improvise the design features of your "lace:" flowers, scrollwork, vine-y trails, little figures and animals, geometric features, whatever. You can paint a repeating design all along the wall, or a series of related designs, or a repeating motif at regular intervals with total variation in between the repeated motifs, whatever your fancy tells you. You can even paint in motifs that relate to your students and lace-making friends -- crochet hooks, bobbins, puns on your friends names (a robin for friend Robyn, for example), and so on.

Finish it all off by painting tiny teardrop shapes along the edge (not the ceiling side -- the "footside"), to represent picots.

Variations on the painted lace idea:
--- Paint the room all one color, and paint "lace" one one whole wall, mural-style.

--- Paint the room one or more solid colors, and paint narrow "lace edgings" around all the trim in the room (the breaks in the wall): around door-sills, window frames, along the ceiling, around niches or dormers, etc.

--- Paint a giant piece of lace diagonally across one corner of one wall, or that wall and its adjacent wall, as if the giant piece was flung there haphazardly by the wind. You can lay it out flat (pencil guide on the wall first), or be *really* adventurous, and paint soft folds into it.

Just ideas, all for your fun, and your students would remember their classroom, wouldn't they?