My teacher, Allie, says all lace makers should have a lace making cat(s), and these are mine. The yellow one is Ben, the gray one is Sam. They both help me to make lace, but Ben helps the most. His favorite helping favors are: unravel all my special thread all over the house, making his own lacy web, & pulling the special lace brass pins out of the pin cushion and dropping them on the floor! He prefers hat pins, but when they aren't handy he simply makes do. His latest feat was to chew the entire edge of one of my lace pillows! (I don't know for sure whether he did it or Sam, but I am assuming it was him.) Now the pillow & cover have millions of tiny bite marks. Luckily it is the smaller pillow, the one I use to experiment, but it is still one of my two pillows. I was not entirely thrilled to find this out, as you can imagine.

May Workshop

These are some pictures of the workshop I went to this May. The teacher, Jeanette, is from the Netherlands. This was her fifteenth year teaching this workshop in Pittsburgh. Hopefully I will soon have finished the project I was working on there so that I can show it to you all! I have been so busy this summer that I haven't had any time to work on it! I haven't touched it since the workshop, actually.

I must apologize, I am not the best photographer! Mike usually gets that job, and he does it much better than I do!

Grama's Black Eyed Susan

This was originally supposed to be a Christmas wreath for my Grandfather. But my Mom & Grama kept on telling me it looked like a Black Eyed Susan flower. So I switched my plans around! I made a green sparkly wreath for my Grandfather, and added a stem & leaves to this. The center is a piece of fabric out of my Christmas dress, which she & I made together, the petals were supposed to be a Christmas wreath, the stem was supposed to be a ring aroung a Christmas ball, and the leaves are the flames from the candle bookmarks I made! I bought the stickers at Michael's and then framed it. She loved it.

posted by Marie

Christmas Spiral Ornament

This is one of the first pieces I made with Allie, my teacher. It is made of straight torchon, a basic netting stitch. It was originally supposed to be made into a spiral, to look like an icicle, but I ran out of time. When I hung it on our Christmas tree that year, it looked like it had already been made into a spiral because of the way the colors were put in!


Posted by Marie

Lace Snowflake

Even though it is small, this is one of the hardest pieces that I've made. It is only about a little bigger than a quarter, but each of those tiny "fans" takes a ton of time & patient tensioning! The thread is metallic, too, which made it stretchy and hard to work with! Not my favorite type of thread!

posted by Marie

Lace Butterfly

This is the first actual piece of lace I made with my teacher.

(The first thing she did when she started to teach me was to have me make what is called a "bandage" in order to see how far I was. It is a pattern using cloth stitch, a basket weave, and half stitch, which looks like rows of Stars of David up close. These two stitches alternate, making what looks like a bandage. It is commonly used for beginners.)

posted by Marie

Hannah's Tree Skirt

This is the actual section of the Tree Skirt that my lace went on. I made the stars, and my grandma made the Cross Stitch Picture. The Cross Stitch Nativity is 11 inches in Diameter! It is so beautiful, I love it! Both the stars & nativity looked awesome on the fabric. My Mom's cousin Nancy pieced the fabric together, and sent us four sections to use. We ended up using three. Yes, those are tiny pieces of fabric all pieced together to make one giant masterpiece! Isn't it lovely?

posted by Marie

Christmas treeskirt stars

These are stars that I made for a tree skirt which my mom's extended family made for my second cousins wedding.

posted by Marie

Crinoline Lady

This is my Mom's birthday gift. It is kind of like a needlepoint sampler because it has a bunch of different types of lace stitches in it. I had to experiment and make my own pattern for the bow from scratch. Originally, all it is supposed to have for the bow is a piece of string tied into a bow, but because the string is metallic, that would have never worked! So I made one with a four-string braid. (Rather than a normal three string braid, which doesn't work with bobbin lace, because the thread is worked in pairs.)

posted by Marie