Contemporary needle lace sampler

 

Needle lace is made with a needle and thread and most of the stitches are variations on blanket or buttonhole stitch. You need an outline from which to anchor the stitches and this can be made by cutting areas out of an existing piece of cloth or by making a framework by couching down threads. In both cases you then fill in the spaces you have made with lace stitches. The little sampler in the image was made by attaching  thin ribbons in a grid pattern to a background that I had painted and collaged and then filling in the open spaces with a variety of needle lace stitches.

I started by filling  some of the rectangular spaces with solid areas of stitching. At the top you can see an area of cloth stitch which starts with a line of thread being sewn straight across the space. You then work back along the thread with simple loops at regular intervals. For the row below that you start again with the thread across the space but your loops this time go round the thread and link into the loops of the previous row of stitches. Once I’d finished the block I then threaded a fine gold thread through the stitches but I could also have done that as I’d worked or used a different colour as my base thread.

 

In one of the lower spaces I worked my row of looped stitches over small lengths of thicker gold thread. With these wider strips of gold I didn’t need to secure them at each side of the space because the looped stitches are sufficient to keep them in place. In the rectangle on the right I have worked a more open stitch called double net stitch and again threaded fine gold through part of the work. To give some texture to the piece I also made some thicker interconnecting bars by sewing several threads across the space forming a rough T shape then worked close blanket stitch over them to form a more solid structure. By interlinking the shapes as I worked they form an intertwined grid. I also embellished the piece with small circular couronnes, made by wrapping threads into a circle and then working blanket stitch tightly all round them. Once made, the finished circles can be sewn to the work with the same thread used to make them. I also added beads and other couched threads, so quite a lot of additions, but I’ve kept the same subdued colour palette throughout the work so hopefully it all works together.