Lace - A First Step

On Saturday, thanks to my wonderful husband and family, I was able to take a day of needle lace classes.  They were taught by two wonderful ladies (one of whom I've known for years). Check out Graces amazing page for patterns and how to instructions.

While making needle lace is glacially slow, it was rather fun.  We used a much more coarse linen that extant examples from the 15-17th centuries.  We stitched with 35/2 thread; our teachers prefer to use 80/2 or even 100/2.  That's the finest you can buy anymore, and it's still not as fine as the period examples.  The linen fabric we used is Barry linen from Gray Lines Linen.

Here's my progress after about 5 hours of class.