petit

As I was working on the ribbon for the skates, Karin suggested to check some sites on weaving. As she pointed out a bobbinlace techniques didn't reproduce the ribbon the way it should. She was so right; the left one is my first test, on the right the original ribbon folded in half. Clearly wooven, so that was the way to go.



So I made a miniature loom to start weaving...It turned out to be só fragile that it was hardly useable. As my ribbon only needed vertical stripes the loom wasn't essential. So I wound up some bobbins with thinner threads and just one weaving thread and started to weave, one up, one down, one up etc...



The result had such a diffrent (much better) look, i was realy a bit surprised to see. Thanks for the tip Karin! Sad to say it still wasn't the way I had envisioned it, there were blocks instead of stripes! But using more strands would widen the ribbon. All I can say is that i could have fiddled with it more (leave some color out but doubled up the color that's left and add more orange), but time wasn't on my side. Reproducing the skates was a gift for my mother-in-law. Yesterday evening I handed them over...

These are the ones she's had for over 40 years,:



And these belong to her since yesterday ;-)
30,8 mm long and 4,2 mm wide, although the wood is too dark (oeps) they lack the fancy leather straps that I had made for my own skates. Instead this pair has old knotted up leather and the acorn tips, just like the big ones. So she can say these are hér skates ;-))