Several years ago I finally joined the neighborhood women’s book club. I will have to profess that in the last 20-30 years I have not been much of a reader. First and foremost, I spend my available free time either tatting, creating needlelace, teaching fiber art techniques, and/or designing/laying out/publishing my books. Keep in mind that I work full-time. But with the realization that I’m an empty-nester, I decided that it was time for me to expand my horizons via reading and what better way than to join a book club. In addition to the stimulation that reading a book gives me, the book club gave me a way to keep in touch with the neighborhood women. And as an added bonus, the get togethers feature goodies of wine and yummy snacks!!! For a long time, I wouldn’t even consider choosing a book for the group to read (they were all experienced readers, whereas I was new to reading). That was until I went to The Sunflower Lacemakers biannual lacemaking retreat and one of the members mentioned that they had found & joined a book club because she had been invited as a ‘lacemaking expert’ while the were reading/discussing a lace related book. This got me to thinking…’what if I used a lace related book to introduce my form of relaxation/interest (lace and lacemaking) to my book-reading friends’?

So I read 2 different books: The Lacemakers Daughter by Diane Keziah Robertson & The Lace Reader by Brumonia Barry. I asked one of the book club members to read both to help choose the most appropriate book for the group and she chose the latter one–The Lace Reader.

I set out a plan to utilize this opportunity to introduce these ‘readers’ to the world of lace. I have a collection of lace acquired through the years in various ways. Some pieces were collected because of my active study of the type: Romanian Point, Teneriffe, Nanduti. Some were ‘rescued’ from antique and thrift shops, some were gifts, etc. None of my pieces are extremely rare or expensive. But all are loved & appreciated. I filled my dining room table with representative pieces of different forms of lace including my own tatting, various needlelace types, bobbin lace, knitted, crocheted and machine lace.

Lower left: machine-made lace. Upper left & lower right: bobbin lace. Upper right: Teneriffe/Nanduti Lace

Lower left: Netted Lace. Swan: Carrickmacross Lace (my design/work). Pile of tatting. My tatting books. Romanian Point Lace. Filet Lace. Knitted lace.

White piece: Knotted lace (Armenian?). Colored: Nanduti. Black: Teneriffe Lace. Storage bins of my collection.

In addition to my collection of lace, I asked my beautiful lacemaking friend, Jennifer Bartling to come in & demonstrate bobbin lacing technique. In the book, The Lace Reader, the characters did bobbin lacemaking. Jennifer drove over 30 miles one way to help me educate my bookclub friends about lacemaking. I regretfully do not have a photo of her demonstrating…..I was too busy that night being a hostess: food, wine, welcoming my guests, as well as giving a verbal/visual tutorial about what is lace, lace types, etc.. I didn’t take the time to take photographs of Jennifer as she was demonstrating.

To my knowledge, I didn’t find any willing recruits wanting to learn a lacemaking or fiber art technique, at least I did try to educate about lace and lacemaking. In the past I used to take tatting and needlelace-making techniques into a ‘cross-stitch’ festival/teaching environment. It was again my attempt to sway ‘cross-stitchers’ into becoming ‘tatters’ or ‘lacemakers’. But I will have to tell you that despite my best efforts, I have come to realize that for the most part, one’s first hobby (reading in the book club group; cross-stitching in the needlework show group) is usually where they choose to stay.

The Lace Reader has a complex enough story line that even the most advanced readers of the book club were sufficiently amused. The victim of the book was a lacemaker who was also a ‘lace reader’. She would hold up a piece of lace in front of a person and read their ‘fortune’. I had never heard of a ‘lace reader’ even though I have been in/around the lacemaking world for a long time (several decades). I did some research on the internet and the only reference to such a thing kept coming back to this book. Thus I believe that the author make it up–a fictional thing for a fictional book.