Lecture given by Dr. Veronika Irvine
Notes:
- Computer scientist & fiber artist – using both to create art
- “tatting” – lace making
Bobbin lace –
- 500 year-old art
- Portrait of Margherita Gonzaga – lace collar constructed of bobbin lace, much of original bobbin lace has been broken down
- The only way to know what historical bobbin lace looked like is through paintings
- Chantilly lace is a specific kind of bobbin lace
- All one continuous piece that take on different appearances in different spots
- 100,000 people left that know how to make bobbin lace – most over the age of 60
Science and Textiles:
- NASA turned to traditional textile weaving techniques so that the material on the cone of spaceships would not stretch
- Carbon fiber – New material for architecture – Lightweight but strong – 3D printing uses this material – can code lace-like designs to print and fill spaces
Practice of Lace-making
- Always work with 4 threads at a time – either do a cross or a twist
- Cross – cross over two middle threads
- Twist – twist left thread over right
- Does not matter what combination of cross/twist you use, threads will always have over and under pattern
- Threads always travel in pairs, lace piece can have hundreds of threads
Comparison with weaving –
- Weaving – threads are always vertical or horizontal, decision is which is on top and which is on bottom – creates a pattern based on which color is on top and which is on bottom
- Jospeh-Marie Jacquard – created mechanism to lift one thread at a time for weaving, each thread segment represents a pixel
- Only need one color with bobbin lace
- Use “holes” to add different dimension and color
Mathematical model –
- Single line for each pair of thread for pattern
- Arrow to indicate the direction
- Dot indicates some combination of cross and twist
5 Key properties –
1) Two pairs come in and two pairs leave – directed graph
2) Patterns repeats to fill any shape – doubly periodic, wrap around a torus
3) Lace is one connected piece – connected graph with combinatorial embedding of genus 1
4) Lace is a braid – crossings have a consistent partial order. No contradictable directed cycles
5) Threads are conserved – use the top of the thread all the way down to the bottom, no broken parts – partition graph drawing into a set of osculating paths, each path homotopic to a (0,1) torus knot – requires knowledge of topology, graph drawing, homeomorphisms
- Infinite number of lace patterns
- Glueing together lattice paths creates a lace pattern
- Increasing the number of rows and columns creates increased number of patterns
- Auxetic material – hinging effect where holes change, difficult to do with weaving, lace makes it easier
Reflection:
This lecture was incredible intriguing and actually quite a lot more relevant to what I am studying than I originally anticipated. Dr. Irvine gave a brief history of bobbin lace and the significance of it’s versatility as well as it’s difference from traditional weaving methods which proved to be very useful to my deciphering the different textile practices.
The comparison between lace and weaving was particularly interesting to me because I realized that what I had been doing with my hand-stitching pattern last weekend was actually a very, very simple lace pattern that I was stitching down onto a piece of material. Through this, I noticed that the art of creating knotwork and that of creating lace are actually quite similar – in fact one could argue that quite a lot knotwork patterns are just enlarged segments of lace that aren’t necessarily always represented on thread. This is because both arts follow the same basic properties: An “over/under” pattern, a single thread runs through the whole design, and lines that function in pairs.
I also was very intrigued by the complexity associated with creating designs through weaving and the comparative simplicity of lace making. It’s quite easy to think of textile crafts and mathematics/computers as mutually exclusive entities. However, when you really look at the mechanics behind those crafts, it’s very obvious that textiles are, in fact, their own form of mathematics. With this knowledge it’s suddenly easy to understand why and how that particular craft was industrialized so quickly as well as how the knowledge behind how things have been made in the past in fading at a rapid pace.