Tips for Working with Lace

I just got home late yesterday from a whirlwind trip to Texas...four guilds back-to-back in four days...whew!   I had a great time, got to visit old friends and had a wonderful time sharing my quilts with each guild.

I am already busy working on new pieces for the upcoming exhibit in Houston and wanted to share a tip you may be interested in.  One quilt I'm currently doing a lot of hand work on has large corners of lace and an icky raw edge.

I always tell my students NOT to quilt lace...you just mash it down and it really isn't attractive anymore.  By quilting it you make it flat and it loses its beautiful texture.  I recommend that you quilt "underneath" it first and then lay the lace down over the top of it.

In this instance I quilted a half-inch grid and a feather wreath  in my 3-layer quilt sandwich.

Then I folded the lace corner over the top of the previously quilted sandwich.  Notice the icky raw edge of the lace...

Because the lace is so large I very lightly hand quilted the lace edgings down.   I am going back in and adding small freshwater pearls in the little dots that are in the lace to provide detail and help tack it down a little bit more.

Because the outer edge of the lace was unattractive and frazzled I needed to cover it.  I have some tatting yardage shown above and placed this over the top of the raw edge of the lace and then added pretty beads in the middle of the holes to dress it up a bit more.

I LOVE how this edge turned out and especially love the old buttons I decided to add around the border.

From now until the exhibit in Houston, I will be able to share tidbits and pieces of the quilts that will be featured and not photos of the entire quilts.  If you are unable to come to Houston this year I promise I will do a fabulous blog post after the show with full pictures of EVERYTHING!

Hugs, Cindy :)