Catherine writes< Surely ALL needlelace is worked by the execution of the simple buttonhole stitch. if not, what other stich is used to work examples of Ros Hills, Contemporary needlelace, Bath's needlelace, or antique laces such as Point de Gaze, Hollie Point, Burano, Halas, Alencon, Youghal, Boris etc - they are all made with variations of either grouping, twisting, voiding etc on a simple Buttonhole stitch! Which stitch did Ros Hills, Jill Nordfors Clark and Virginia Churchill Bath use if wasn't the simple Buttonhole stitch I wonder?> I am writing a catalog entry for a work in the show by Jill Nordfors Clark, so I thought it would be a good idea to read her books as part of the research. I am surprised to see in her 1974 book that she has a lot of stitches such as chain stitch, coral stitch, stem stitch, Cretan stitch, Ceylon stitch and various knotted stitches in her work. In fact she has a stitch called Venetian-point stitch which is a knotted stitch and does not resemble what I perceive to be the stitches in Venetian lace. She also relies heavily on needle weaving, both on straight âwarpâ threads as she calls them and on radial ones. She also lays straight warp threads one way, then at right angles to them, creating a grid. Then she can work stitches on this by wrapping and weaving. In fact, the book deals a great deal with doing detached embroidery as part of surface embroidery, although she does mention that you can do it and cut away the supporting structure. However, there are not really a lot of instructions for that. There is no description of architects linen, or how to hide thread ends along the edges, and then cover them later. Many of the works in her book, when they are free standing have been worked on metal or wooden rings to provide the outside support. Just thumbing through it, the pieces in Bathâs book seem to do this kind of thing as well. Sadly, my copy of Nordfors 1974 book which I think I bought after her second book appeared in 1999, is a deaccessioned copy from the Osterhout Free Library of Wilkes-Barre, PA. I hope that it was deaccessioned because it was replaced with her second book which has a lot of the same material but has more color and photography. The second book appears to have a lengthy photo series of how to make lace with hog gut, which is new to it. One of the hog gut pieces, Sepia Bowl is going to be in the Lace, not Lace show. Devon
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