Lace: knitted (top); tatted (bottom)

Family commitments and snatches of unpacking have taken their toll on embroidery and knitting. I did reach the point of completing all the component parts of a baby coat but then I decided I didn’t like it at all and undid the whole thing! Its replacement, a simple lace edged cardigan, is nearly finished, but finding the time to make it up is something else again. The lace edging was, however, a joy and just the right sort of knitting to take on recent train journeys – the pulsating forward movement of the train helped sustain the simple pattern repeat increasing from 5 stitches to 10 and back again over 10 rows. A journey to London and then on to Kent and back was just the right amount of time to produce an edging for the whole jacket – extraordinarily for a garment for such a small child, this amounted to a bit more than 4 feet!

Knitted lace (from a Debbie Bliss pattern for a lace edged cardigan)

I did once take up a different sort of lacemaking and strangely enough this made an appearance recently, tumbling out of a box  where I’d never have thought to have looked should I actually have wanted to find it. When I made my Elizabethan jacket (blogged about here) I originally thought it should be edged with hand made lace as seen in some, though by no means all, of the original jackets. Tatting seemed the easiest way of making lace for the sort of look I wanted and once I got going and mastered that knack of the thing I just kept going until this lace was the length I wanted. With great excitement I tacked the lace to the jacket and stood back to take stock. It was quite wrong – the lace was too fussy for the jacket and the jacket told its own story much better without the lace. I put the lace to one side and for all the work involved it packed up into a very small bundle. Tucked away, I forgot about it.  Now many years later I would love to find a use for it. It would work well on a christening dress like the one I made here (for my niece 40 years ago and yet to get another outing) and I’m tempted to add it to this (except now I see it already has a lace edging!!). Perhaps I’ll just wait to see if something else suggests itself?

Tatted lace (from ‘Tatting ‘ published by Coates Sewing Group, 1970)

‘Tatting’ a Coates Sewing Group Book,1970