Puncetto redux

I have previously drawn attention to things fitting neatly and unexpectedly together on the craft front, but this is an example of particular beauty and joy. It relates to the Puncetto Valsesiano I posted about on Wednesday.

Now I have been having quite a bit of difficulty this week; I'm not going to go into all the details, but suffice it to say it has been necessary to keep my MP posted about it pretty much every time anything has happened, so he's been getting quite a lot of e-mails from me about it. I think I can now say it's all sorted, but I won't know for sure till next week. And I was just about to post on Mastodon on Wednesday morning when I got an e-mail related to this difficult situation, which threw me for a loop. I needed to do a number of things as a result of that e-mail, including, of course, contacting my MP again; and by the time I'd done all that, I'd completely forgotten I was about to post.

I remembered at lunchtime; and the point of that, of course, was that by lunchtime all the USAians were awake. Had I posted earlier, they wouldn't have seen my post unless they had been specifically looking for it, and there was no particular reason why they would. And what I posted about was, of course, the Puncetto Valsesiano, because that was what I had originally intended to post about and I do try to keep moaning on Mastodon to a minimum, since there is already quite enough of that going on. (I do have the occasional grouse about Sibyl's appalling behaviour, but I put that under a cut.)

And it just so happened that a lady living in New England was online at the time; and this lady just so happened to be a lacemaker. Not even just a lacemaker, but the librarian of the New England Lace Society... which had just had a donation of half a dozen or so books on no other subject than Puncetto Valsesiano. But they had a problem. These books were in Italian, so none of the American lacemakers could read them.

So Lace Librarian Lady replied to my post and explained that she had these books (donated so recently that they were still in a box in her sitting room, though she had just got all the titles up on the society's website). I thanked her very much, obviously thinking I'd be able to get hold of one or two of these books online now I knew what they were; and I explained that the fact that they were in Italian was not a problem. I can read Italian.

Of course, it wasn't as simple as that (insert Brexit-related rant here). I used to be able to order books straight from Italy; they might take a bit of finding, but I could get them. Not any more. The book I most wanted (a beginners' manual by Anna Axerio) was available, but only in Italy. I spent quite a while digging around to see if I could find it anywhere else, but in the end I had to concede defeat. So I got back to Lace Librarian Lady with a plan.

I explained that obviously I wouldn't normally suggest doing such a thing because of copyright issues, but I'd made every effort to get hold of this book in the regular way and met with no success, so... if she could scan it for me, I could translate it for her and her lace society in exchange. It would, at any rate, be a payment, even if not to the original author; it was, in fact, the best I could do in the circumstances.

I'm delighted to say that we have a deal. She is sending the book in 20-page chunks so that the file size is easy to handle; I've skimmed through the first chunk and most of it I can translate off the top of my head, though there are a few technical words for which I'll need my trusty Zingarelli. This means not only that I get to learn the lace technique, but also that an entire lace society gets to do the same thing when otherwise they'd have been puzzling over the diagrams alone; and, moreover, once they can do that, they should have enough context to be able to make sense of the diagrams in the remaining books, even though they can't read the text. And if I can find contact details for the author, I shall of course let her know. She'll probably be delighted to have her work translated into English.

I don't actually believe in coincidences. 😃

And in other news, I find I tend to pick up my netting when very stressed, since it requires no thought or concentration (especially not the pieces I'm making for the drama group, which are just big squares); hence over the last few days I've made a half-square that is about 1.5 metres on the side. It'll need to be bigger than that, but still, that's very good progress. Nothing is ever wasted, not even extreme stress (though I'm glad it seems to be over, at least for the moment). The aforesaid drama group, having swapped some of the parts around, is now short of someone to play Bill Bowline, which is a major part; so we have a casting call out at the moment, and in the meantime it appears I'm going to be attending rehearsals simply so that there's someone to read those lines. Which was not really what I intended, especially since I'm just about to restart my OU studies, but so it goes; I hope they're able to find someone within the next couple of weeks.

On the bright side, at least they're no longer doing it at Christmas!