Trying new kinds of bobbin lace

The last few years I've mainly been making Bucks Point bobbin lace, and not very much of it since I don't actually fit it into my craft time often enough.  The past few weeks I went back to Torchon lace to make the pincushion square I posted about last week, which was hard because I couldn't really remember how to do Torchon.

I finished the square, with some mistakes which I was able to camouflage when I sewed it onto the pincushion.

Here is the finished pincushion which is a 'biscornu' shape.  I took it to my lace course this weekend and used it. Nice to make something in lace which I can actually use.  I think that's one of the bigger inhibitors from bobbin lace becoming more popular: there is very little to make that modern people actually use.  Nobody wants to launder handmade lace edgings, few people need bookmarks or use cloth hankies, and there are only so many cards you can make (plus people throw them out after all that work you put in).

So I spent the weekend on a Bucks Lace course where I tried floral bucks (Floral Buckinghamshire Point Ground Lace, to give it the full name) for the first time.  After spending approximately 14 hours, I managed to produce one inch of lace:  Ta Da!!  You can't even see it because there are too many pins in the way, lol.

It's an edging, done in relatively fine thread (Madeira Cotona 80) and although it doesn't look like much, it was actually fairly tricky for a first timer.  The challenge now will be to keep going without having a teacher at hand to bail me when I run into a problem.  I found it quite a challenging and tiring weekend but it was good to learn something new.  I have a couple of other normal bucks point projects on the go but I get a bit bored with them because I already know how to do them.  I'm going to get a secondhand pillow stand then perhaps I can leave a pillow set up downstairs and work on it more often than I do now.  Also it will save my back, which gets quite sore hunching over a big pillow on a normal table.

And that's it this week apart from a bit of knitting.  Finishing up the pincushion and getting bobbins and pricking reach for the weekend took up all the craft time this week.  Plus I've had to do some gardening now that it's turned into autumn:  I planted up some pots of bulbs for the spring and started cutting stuff back.  And I'm still picking apples, tonight I made some apple sauce which we had for pudding plus I froze some for later.  There are still apples on the tree which are getting really big, but they don't seem to want to come off when I try lifting and twisting (the technique recommended by Monty Don on Gardener's World!).