Lace, Crochet, Damask Patterns Making Comeback

Remember the lace trim on women's fashions last year? Well, as they always say, what starts in fashion quickly finds it way to home decorating, and lace, crochet, and damask patterns are increasingly popular in items designed for the home. Look for white and black patterns everywhere.

Whether it's a lace pattern on a pillow, upholstery fabric, a decorative piece of glasswork, or a soap dish, lace is definitely big news. You can find lace patterns on mirror, white-on-white patterns on walls and furniture, decorative patterns on dinnerware, knobs, and bowls.

Fresh contemporary interior decorating ideas include modern wallpaper designs with floral lace and doilies patterns in white, black, gray, beige and other brighter colors. Also lace fabric and doily patterns can be added to your wall decoration with wall panels, tiles, stenciling and painting designs.

Lace trim, lace fabric, and doily patterns on wall tiles and small accessories can beautifully decorate shelves, tables and the largest part of your room, the walls, with unique texture, classic patterns and neutral white and black colors.

Lace can be used for stenciling a romantic wall decoration. Lace fabric can be attached to the wall, ceiling, furniture or accessories. Lace fabric, glued or stapled to canvas makes eye catching panels for unusual modern wall decoration.

Lace fabric is a stylish choice for making attractive window curtains, room dividers, and creative door or wall decoration ideas with hanging, free flowing beautiful pieces of fabric.

Know Your Lace

Cutwork

One method of making lace nvolves making holes in fabric. In making Broderie Anglaise lace, the 19th-century lace maker cut holes in fabric and made tiny stitches around the holes to keep fabric threads from fraying. The lace maker made varied patterns of punched holes. Lace makers often pulled threads from woven fabric to leave holes.

Lacy White Work

Fine white fabric contained cut work as well as threads drawn together to form holes known as drawn work. White embroidery over the top added to the richness of this lace.

Needle Woven Laces

Buratto is a type of needle woven lace where the lace maker weaves threads on a square grid work of lace. Designs include animals, birds and human figures.

Needle woven laces show rich, fancy minute needle stitches sewn into a handmade mesh background. Alencon lace, which grew out of the mid 1700s, is a needle woven, stylized floral lace with complex designs. Tiny stitches and knots figure into the hand stitching.

Pointe de Venise is a family of 17th-century Italian needle laces. They consist of elaborate, flowing and intricate designs with repetitive motifs. Individual stitches are difficult to distinguish and include small decorative stitches in the cloth work. Fine bars covered with buttonhole stitches add texture to this lace. Collectors often need magnifying glasses to identify sometimes minute stitches.

Battenberg Tape Laces

Easy to recognize, Battenberg lace grew out of 17th-century Mezzo Punto, wherein loosely woven tapes served as a background for holding stitches. Lace makers gathered threads or strings and attached them, in looping patterns, to the tape. The tape, when sewn to other fabrics, could wind without puckering into various swirls and patterns.

Decorated Machine-Made Nets

With the invention of machine net around 1800, all types of motifs were sewn in to decorate mesh netting. Buttonhole stitches, chain stitches, filled-in bar stitches and all types of intricate stitches might decorate machine-made vintage lace nets.

Knotted Needle Lace

Armenian Lace, a design of round, petaled florets and diamond-shaped leaves, uses this distinctive style made with knotted stitches. It might be tightly worked or more open, depending on the spacing of the stitches. Single, geometric designs often appear in this type of lace.