Lacing a Lady

Since you asked about the lacing for Jane Turner, I wanted to share the resources I found when getting ready to work.  Well, whatever I asked my good friend Google to find when I first looked, I was completely unable to replicate it.  When preparing to lace Lady Jane, I read a number of online answers to “what kind of thread should I use?” and the most repeated answer was perle cotton.

  

THIS LINK *might* be one of the sites I found before – at least the post mentions (perhaps just implies?) using a single strand to do the side-to-side lacing and a second single strand for top-to-bottom.

Anyway, other than securing the corners, YES - Jane is laced to her mounting board (acid-free foam core) with just TWO lengths of perle cotton.  

While I've laced all the cross stitch pieces I've framed, I had not tried this single-strand method before.  Noah is in a 16 by 20 frame (I think), and that's laced using dental floss with a fair number of starts and stops - probably ten to twelve of floss each time.

Anyway, back to Jane.  Starting in the center of the longer dimension is what I normally do.  Pull a yard or two of perle cotton from the ball and thread your needle onto the end.  Do not cut the perle cotton and do not anchor it into your fabric.  Go back and forth (er … side to side) several times – three or four stitches – and then very gentle pull more thread through each stitch you’ve taken so that you again have a length of thread to work with.  Take three or four more stitches and again work the thread through all the stitches you’ve made.  After you’ve used up what you’ve pulled loose from the ball of perle cotton, unwind several more lengths.

Yes, this is EXTREMELY tedious!! 

When working on Jane, I would do three or four “pulls” at a time from the ball of perle cotton, and then work that through all stitches taken till I got to the place where the needle was.  To be more specific about what I mean by a pull, I would hold the perle cotton ball down on the work surface with one hand and pull a length out with the other hand until my arm was fully extended.  So for me, a pull is a bit more than one yard.

Oh yeah, since you start in the middle of the side, it’s a really good idea to try to keep count of the “pulls” you take from the ball.  Once you get to the end you’ve been working toward, make sure you have a foot or two extra thread at the end, then remove your needle from the thread.  Now comes the really fun part.

Since you’ve been keeping count of the number of pulls you’ve taken from the ball of perle cotton, you know how much thread to pull off the ball to lace the other half of your piece of needlework.  This will likely convince you that I am completely nuts:  make the same number of pulls from the ball of perle cotton as you used to lace up half of the side of your stitched piece, being very careful about how you lay this down on whatever you’re using for a work surface – you really don’t want this to get tangled up.  Add a few more pulls as a safety margin, then cut the thread and thread your needle. 

At this point, you go back to taking three or four stitches from side to side and then working your thread through.  Since there was an enormous, piled-up bunch of thread, I’m pretty sure I did three or four stitches, worked just a couple of yards of thread through, then took three or four more stitches.  The huge pile of thread tangled up twice and I very carefully picked out the knots both times – with this much effort invested, I was determined it would be a single length of thread!

Tedious. 

Have I said tedious?

I probably should have started out by saying the pins holding Jane to the mounting board remain in place while lacing.  I kept a towel folded over the pins as much as possible so as not to snag the thread.

After reaching the other end and finally cutting that thread, it’s a good idea to turn your needlework over to make sure it looks the way you want it to.  If it’s not perfect, you can still make small adjustments at this point by removing pins and scooching the ground fabric one way or the other, then repining.  When it’s just right, it’s time to tighten up the lacing, once again starting in the center and working to each end.  When the entire side was snug, I anchored the thread.

I followed the same process to do the lacing top to bottom.  Various online references I found said mitering the corners is not necessary, but I’ve always done that, so Jane’s corners are mitered and stitched down.

This was undoubtedly way more detail than anyone was looking for…  If you’ve made it to the end, thanks for staying with me!

>^..^<