In the red box, I flubbed up and used a center pin in the windmill.  Elsewhere, I’ve started using support pins around the join as I wanted to experiment with.
Getting proper tension at the junction points is much more difficult without the center pin to twist against. The gold thread also does not compress as much as the cotton, linen or silk threads, so the scale of the pattern (my previous metric to eyeball the scale was three threads side-by-side would be roughly what a four strand braid would compress to.  I’ll have to keep that in mind for my next gold piece. The end result is something that looks sloppier than my other pieces.  It’s a little discouraging – to see progression from a loose cotton, down to tighter linen, and tighter again silk and then lose it moving to the gold.  I have a lot of learning to do.

I am also afraid to pull on these threads as much as I have been with the others.  I’ve seen a couple spots when I have tensioned too much and can see the yellow silk core underneath the wrapped foil.  It is thicker thread but much more delicate to work with.  And at $30 US a spool, I’m not pushing it.  As you can see from the photo above, what a difference *actual* metal content makes!  The curve was amazing.

This post serves to replace a missing blog entry from September 2nd, 2015.  I'm recovering the text from my A&S documentation, which included citations to original sources - I'm keeping this in to help others track down resources for research.  I hope it helps. 

My gilt passing thread arrived!  Winding my bobbins and will repeat the pattern in REAL metallic thread. 
 
According to An Early Lace Workbook (Shepherd, 2009), picots on metal lace were simple loops extending from the braid, instead of the double, twisted, picots I had been using up until now.[1] Gillian Dye’s Gold & Silver Edgings (Dye, Gold & Silver Edgings: Sixteenth & Seventeenth Century Lace Book 1, 2012) and Surface Decoration (Dye, Surface Decoration in Silk and Metallic Thread: Sixteenth & Seventeenth Century Lace Book 3, 2013) books also echo this.[2][3]  To make my picots more pronounced, I purchased a box of large shaft quilting T-pins.  With this piece I am also attempting not to use pins inside the work (inside each windmill crossing) but around the junctions, to not leave gaping holes. Gillian Dye has made the suggestion that this is how the period metal laces were constructed, so I’ll try it.[4]


[1] An Early Lace Workbook, Rosemary Shepherd, 2009, pg. 39

[2] Gold & Silver Edgings: Sixteenth & Seventeenth Century Lace Book 1, 2012, pg. 13

[3] Surface Decoration in Silk and Metallic Thread: Sixteenth & Seventeenth Century Lace Book 3, pg. 14

[4] Gold & Silver Edgings: Sixteenth & Seventeenth Century Lace Book 1, 2012, pg. 13