Well, I've been looking online to see if I could find you all a useful site explaining Free Lace, but it appears to be fairly unknown, at least in the states. The book I have is from Nihon Vogue (Japanese Vogue for those who don't know) and it's pretty hard to find resources for it online but I did find this link to it.

Anyway, the long and short of it is, you take a water soluble adhesive plastic sheet and layout an arrangement of yarns, fibers, ribbons...whatever. Then you lay another sheet of the plastic on top and sew a grid of support rows and columns.

When you have everything sewn in place, you dissolve the plastic in water and all you are left with is the design and the sewn grid. It's a fascinating technique, and when done right seems quite lovely.

I think I've achieved "vaguely interesting" in my attempt. I plead the newbie defense.

So here she is:

Kinda hard to see what's going on, huh? And that one side looks a little wonky. I should block this a bit.

Here's a detail shot

I used a blend of Trendsetter and Artfibers yarns along with standard and metallic threads.

And here's one more shot of her looking moody.


So that's Free Lace.

Oh and for all of you who have left great comments these past couple days, thanks. I love intelligent discourse, regardless of whether we see eye to eye or not.

And for those who cannot wait for it to be over, it is. I'm back to posting about my normal doggy and crafty related topics.