Marking time with lace and pins

I’ve been busy this week writing about net curtains and lace panels – one article about my Battle of Britain lace panels and the other about my PhD work. The Battle of Britain article looks at how the original panels were designed and made and how I went about producing my contemporary response to them. The other article is looking at the net curtain as a metaphor for women who feel home is both a sanctuary and a prison. The work is based on female gothic novels and sensation fiction from the nineteenth century, so books such as Jane Eyre and The woman in white, but with parallels to today. In the research I used pins and needles on net curtains to produce tally marks counting out units of time, as this sewing equipment would be what the gothic heroine had to hand to record her plight. I also use the idea of the net curtain trapping whispers, secrets and the memories of the home. It’s been interesting going back to the PhD work and rewriting it for a different publication – still a way to go though, it’s not finished yet. I might start counting off the days with pins!