Bobbin lace and leather! Poor over coffee memories. Superb sunrise to start my day!

The secret of bobbin lace!

At this moment I am reading the incredible useful e-books of Erin from Made Urban. She has simple but very  genius ideas like bringing together products with the same color to create unity (in a craft display). I created some series like my pool wear collection and more here!, but lots of my products are kind of disparate.

To apply this principle I had a look at all my products and found out that I have a lot of red/burgundy bracelets and a lot of them are embellished with lace.  And while stuffing my new closet (hey, I haven't shown it to you), I discovered my box filled with real lace. I say real lace because I am Belgian from the Flemish region and we are very proud of our world known bobbin lace.

LoveLea's red leather & lace bracelet collection

How I am so sure it is bobbin lace?

Because the town where I was raised, small as it is, has a tradition of bobbin lace. When I was in the fifth grade of elementary school, we had a choice between the regular needle work lessons  or going to the bobbin lace class. I choose the latter and with a couple of other girls we crossed the whole school to the kindergarten section where the class of Soeur Marie des Anges was situated! Yes, I went to an all girl, catholic school, directed by nuns!

Anyway, the class was fun, more relaxed, at the most 5 girls and at the end of the school day. We learned the basics as where to put your pins, read and comprehend the pattern charts because each stitch has its symbol. I I remember the linen stitch and the embellishments as the spider, picots and the fan. We made only  long strips of lace. Albeit they couldn't be that long because I still have a little booklet with samples of what we learned and made. I never made it to lace in a circle on a round cushion because the next year I went to a boarding school.

A page of my bobbin lace sample booklet with spider motifs.

Above is an mage of a page of the sample booklet we got at the end of the school year. It shows varieties of the "spider" motif.

My collection of red+lace bracelets contains a large cuff embellished with a crocheted doily motif; (I have a plain one for myself and the cuff is heavenly and pleasantly warm in winter.) The white  motif ads freshness to the dark winter days.

LoveLea's red leather cuff with white vintage motif

For the second narrow bracelet I used a piece of bicoloured crocheted lace made out of a very fine thread; my mother in law gave it to me, it is what is left from a headscarf. It is a very simple but very beautifull example of crocheted lace.

Lovelea's red leather bracelet with
vintage crocheted lace

Here comes the bracelet adorned with real bobbin lace. The name of the motif is "little spider". Bobbin lace can be faked fairly good! but I'll tell you a little SECRET: if you can see the little, tiny holes where the pins used to sit, then you have real bobbin lace. Because this lace has been washed several times, only the holes in the spiders are still visible in the image below right.

Red leather bracelet
with vintage bobbin lace

Bobbin lace detail showing
 the pin holes 

And for the fourth bracelet I used a sturdy mechanically produced lace. To compensate this fact, I used a vintage glass evil eye bead as button.

LoveLea's red leather bracelet with
 lace and vintage evil eye bead.

Poor over coffee

When reading Emily Smith's post  (she is Editor of The Best of This Life) about poor over coffee, I was pleasantly surprised that a whole post was dedicated to poor over coffee. I haven't known any other way of making coffee in my whole life. I think I was in my twenties when I had an Italian expresso for the first time and a Turkish coffee.

I have memories of my father making coffee with the Melitta filter in our own big coffee pot. In the morning when descending the staircase to have breakfast, the smell of fresh coffee awaited us. While the right amount of water was put to boiling, my father, who made coffee every morning for the whole family, measured out the number of table spoons of coffee and a little tiny bit of chicory root into the coffee filter. The chicory is some habit, left over from the war when they substituted coffee by chicory or roasted  acorns. When the water boiled, he poured only a small amount of water so the coffee had time to swell and after this first time he just filled the filter with water covering the filter with a lid, so everything could stay warm.


But before we used the paper filter, we used a cotton bag that was sewn to a metal ring that fitted in the coffee pot. Farmers and poor people used the same method but they didn't use a ready made bag, they sew a nylon SOCK into the holder. The cotton bag made tastier coffee than the paper filter but I bet you can imagine the horror of emptying this bag full of coffee grounds every day and washing the thing every day! The paper filter was very convenient but we lost some of the taste.

Sunrise

Today I got up early to finish this post and I have been rewarded with a superb sunrise: the sky was on fire. Things like this make me feel good and energizes me the whole day.

Sunrise Thursday morning.

About my Halloween jewelry, 

I took what I had made: 2 chokers, 2 bracelets and 2 pair of earrings to the local gift shop and they are doing great. This is why I don't show pictures of this creations.


I hope you liked my bracelets (available @ my FB page, LoveLea.) and my childhood memories.

 See you next week.