textile dreams – fibery wake up

 I finally finished the lace fillings:

You can see more detail by clicking on the picture. The lace filling for the last seed is very simple. It is the Third Lace Stitch in the Encyclopedia of Needlework.  Buttonhole stitches are worked in groups of three next to each other, then a space of the length of 3 stitches is left. On the way back the groups of three are worked in the larger loops.

At the moment the different areas of the lace look quite indistinct. Especially the dense stitches of the seeds are running into each other, without a clear delineation between the different areas. The outline doesn’t look very clean, either. So, to finish the lace up, the outline needs to be covered with dense buttonhole stitches. Generally, a doubled up outline thread is laid along the lines before buttonholing to pad the outline a bit, and further threads can be applied to make a bigger outline. I think I’ll try this kind of relief with some of the lines in this design. The No. 20 thread will be used for the padding, and No. 80 for sewing the buttonhole stitches.

As promised, I want to show you in a bit more detail how the different lace stitches are worked. First the dense stitch I use for the seeds:

After working a row of dense buttonhole stitches the thread is laid down over the finished row and led under the outline in the same place where the row was started. The thread is then whipped once around the outline to get to the slightly higher starting point for the next row.

In this row the buttonhole stitches are worked into the stitches of the previous row, with the needle going into the loop of the stitch and under the laid down thread as shown above. The result is a very dense fabric. This stitch was extensively used in some of the old laces for filling in the lace motifs.

The second lace stitch I’m using for the “wings” of the maple seeds is the Sixth Lace Stitch from the Encyclopedia of Needlework. It is shown there with 5 stitches worked in each loop (the illustration is actually Fig. 724, seems to be mixed up with 725) , I used only three.

In the first row large buttonhole stitches are worked between each group of three stitches of the previous row:

In the second row three close stitches are worked into each stich of the previous row:

Most of the time the lace stitches are really just buttonhole stitches in different sizes and formations. There are endless possibilities there for combining those stitches. The books I referred to are good starting points to find out more.

In the meantime I’m almost finished with working the lace fillings. So, in the next part I hope to show you how the design looks like with all the lace stitches worked and get started with covering the outline with buttonhole stitches.