Free-Form Crocheted Lace

This week, I'm laboring against all odds to clean out the huge, huge house sufficient to sell it....In fact, it goes on the market tomorrow, which is pretty terrifying.  We haven't finished painting the deck, which we must do before it rains tomorrow night, and the third floor (1,000 square feet, for god's sake) looks like a yarn museum.  A very MESSY yarn museum, I should add quickly, complete with dress form and yarn winder, etc., and you do NOT sell houses that way.   I won't mention the basement, which is full of rugs and MANNEQUINS.  You walk into the 1896 basement, turn left, and run smack into a gigantic CROWD of mostly-headless mannequins.  Talk about a nightmare.

At odd moments, I am working at a free-form lace shawl -- some images for you to enlarge.

Size H hook, with a mohair-acrylic yarn (Botticini) that I bought I know not why many, many years ago.  It will settle down when I get done and give it a stiff block.  But, for now, the challenge is to complete the entire shawl without breaking the yarn, all the while keeping it flat.  It tends to ruffle out at the edges, so I have had to backtrack a couple of times.  This technique, like other free-form craft forms, has its own DNA.  Each maker does it a bit differently.  Mine looks completely unlike Myra Wood's productions, even though I was introduced to this cut-loose exercise from her some years ago in a class at the Madrona fiber retreat (Tacoma, Washington). 

I was a crocheter before I was a knitter -- thread crochet, of course, not wool -- so when I am under stress, crochet is my default position.  It calms me down, soothes the raveled sleeve, and so on.

More later, when the house is ready for Grosse Pointe house hunters, who spend far too much time planning their next, bigger house purchase, and tend to keep track of every little flaw in a house so they can deduct it from the price.  This time, they have a shock coming.  I have no intention of paying for someone else's renovations.  I'll simply take it off the market.

svb