Friday, November 6, 2009

Lace shopping

I had fun this week looking around on etsy.com at all kinds of things. Bought a few gifts, started to spruce my online shop back up, and found some wonderful treasures, including antique laces. I found some antique bobbin laces, including some from Bedfordshire, England. I got a really nice piece of vintage French bobbin lace. I found 12 yards of a hand-crocheted trim for just $15.00 (vintage, of course.) I included a picture here, so you can see one of the things I found. I thought this would be really fun to use for finishing, or who knows? The lace shown is two feet of Victorian handmade bobbin lace and it comes with the antique photograph, too (for ten dollars). Love that moustache!

I think people often under-value hand-work. If you figure the amount of time it took to crochet 12 yards of lace, plus the cost of supplies...do you come up with $15.00? So glad I can give these a good home. If you want to go on your own treasure hunt, it's easy (you can find other lovely needlework items on etsy -- search for antique buttons, trim, fabric, even quilt squares.) Just go to etsy.com and start typing away.

Talked to Barb at Blackbird Designs yesterday -- she's so cool. She told me that sometimes when they want to antique some fabrics, they actually sand the fabric with sandpaper. I'm going to give that a try. Nothing like taking something new and making it look shoddy, hm?

2 comments:

Jacqueline Korteland Boller said...

I have some cabinet lace that my Oma crocheted for me...I still have it. Originally, it fit well on the cabinets of my condo, but doesn't fit on the cabinets here in the present house...but I have them...she knitted and crocheted like a demon, so didn't take her long!!:)

too_busy_to_stitch said...

Wow, that's gorgeous - I agree that handworked goods are undervalued. That's the very reason that I'm stitching less cards nowadays - which gives me a little more time for your gorgeous kits of the month, lolol! Viv xx