The main difficulty with making lace eggs is that the styrofoam
eggs which you can buy differ in form and size from batch to
batch, even if they come from the same source. If you have made a
lace pricking to fit a styrofoam egg, you can never be sure
whether or not it will fit an egg from another batch.
Therefore it doesn't make sense for me to make lace prickings for
eggs to be worked by other lacemakers. The only way is for you to
buy enough styrofoam eggs at one time and for you to
make a basic pricking to fit. Therefore I have included
instructions for making lace prickings for eggs at the end of this
page.
Alternatively you can try to work your eggs without a pricking. In
her book Fri Knipling (Borgen 1984), Jana
Novak describes how to make a lace ball without a pricking. She
makes a sketch of the lace directly on the styrofoam
ball and then covers the ball with cling film. The method can be
used just as well for eggs. But if you work like this, you must be
very careful when tensioning the threads. Otherwise the pins cut
slits in the styrofoam and end up in the wrong place.
It works a bit better if you cover the styrofoam with Tyvek
(available as envelopes which you cannot tear) or with closely
woven cloth before you sketch the lace on it. The Tyvek and cloth
hold the pins in place better than the styrofoam alone does.
But for regular, geometrically exact lace you need a pricking. How
to make a pricking to fit an egg is described below.
How to make a pricking to fit a styrofoam egg:
1. With strips of graph paper or something similar, the
styrofoam egg is prepared for the measuring process as shown in
the picture on the left. The strips of paper are pinned to the egg
in such a way than pins can be put into the egg at 1 cm intervals,
measuring always from one of the poles.
2. Then the circumference of the egg is measured at each ring of
pins. To do that lay a thread around the egg "uphill"
from a ring of pins and then pull it firmly against the pins. With
a fine felt-tip pen, make a mark across the overlapped ends of the
thread.
3. Then measure the distance between the two felt-tip marks on the
thread; the result is the circumference of the egg at this
position and is entered into a table together with the distance of
the ring of pins from the pole.
4. With this information you can draw the segments of the lace
pricking.
My example is for a 6 cm styrofoam egg and a lace pricking with 8
segments:
Distance from
the
pole at the pointed
end of the egg
Circumference
of the egg
Width of the
segment
(for a pricking
with 8 segments)
10 mm
58 mm
7.66 mm
20 mm
95 mm
11.78 mm
30 mm
122 mm
15.04 mm
40 mm
137 mm
17.12 mm
50 mm
140 mm
17.20 mm
60 mm
122 mm
15.00 mm
70 mm
85 mm
10.60 mm
80 mm
25 mm
3.14 mm
84 mm
0 mm
0 mm
The blunt end of the segment drawn above is at the bottom. If you
set eight such segments together with the blunt ends in the centre -
as shown in the drawing on the right - you have an empty lace
pricking which will fit the styrofoam egg you have measured. On this
empty pricking you can mark your pin holes.
