Biology based lace

I hadn’t realised how much lace I had made based on biological themes until I wrote an article about it last month. I then found that I couldn’t include all the pieces in my 1000 word limit so had to leave many of them out. In the article I concentrated on my cell like pieces which are made of free bobbin lace without a formal pattern and include beads and tallies to suggest the parts of the cell. Some of those I had to exclude are the series based on a theme of genetics, chromosomes and cell division. An example is the piece above which was inspired by dividing cells seen under the microscope. It was made by producing a spiral piece of lace and then attaching pairs to the first piece of lace to add another layer to it, to give a three dimensional effect, as if the two layers were separating. Lace lends itself so well to reproducing the appearance of biological structures, with its combinations of holes, threads and more solid areas, that it should be no surprise that I’ve used it to represent so many different types of biological tissues.