Texas Heritage Day at Jesse Jones Park

This is little Emily learning to make bobbin lace

This weekend, we spent a day doing a living history demonstration for Texas Heritage Day at Jesse Jones Park in Spring, Texas.

As usual, Phil took along a small loom and hand spindles and spent his day enabling new hand spinners. For a change from spinning and weaving, I took along my bobbin lace pillow with a long edging in Bucks Point Lace.

Among the park volunteer re-enactors is the blacksmith who has three young daughters aged 4, 8 and 11. These three have been coming to the heritage days and historic living days with their father for several years and participating in the various activities as much as possible. At this point, they know and are known enough among the volunteers that they can safely and easily wander from demonstration to demonstration and assist in such activities as butter churning, bread making, clothes washing, weaving, spinning and in my case, bobbin lace making.

The youngest, Emily, was fascinated with my English bobbins with their various woods, colors and bright beaded spangles and spent a lot of time standing next to me gently touching and admiring and commenting of the various designs. To keep her from constantly reaching across my pillow and tangling the bobbins, I finally took her up onto my lap and taught her how to do the stitch I was using to make the background mesh , a basic net stitch and a twist. She spent several hours happily making the mesh ground while I placed the pins and then scampering to the weaver behind me to treadle the loom or to the spinner to treadle the wheel while I worked on the more complex motifs and filling sections of the lace.

It was a delightful experience for me as Emily was charmingly content to sit on my lap and work the mesh while she chatted about the bobbins, her sisters, what her dad did when he demonstrated , how much she enjoyed treadling Julia's wheel, and helping Jane weave. She picked up the mesh stitch by the fourth repetition. It was inspiring to the visitors, especially the younger children to see that a young child could pick up lacemaking skills. It was also interesting for most parents to see a 4 year old child actively participating in re-enacting heritage skills and learning important lessons in self confidence, communication and sharing a work load to make the work go faster.

On top of enjoying having the sturdy weight of a little girl in my lap again, the weather was comfortable mid 70's with full sun, nice shade and an occassional cooling touch of breeze.

All in all the day made a nice break between two days of biking for mileage and training. Of course since it was a none bike day, the wind was not blowing, while both Friday and today we had head winds but what can you do? It was good weekend.