About a year ago, when we started planning the celebrations for the Wolds Lacemakers 40th anniversary year, I suggested an idea to the committee that I’d been thinking about for a while.
In talking to new and more experienced lacemakers and those who were interested in learning to make lace, there was almost always someone who would say that it was all well-and-good in the workshop or meeting, but as soon as they got home and didn’t have someone to show them, they forgot what they were doing. This was both a barrier to learning new stitches and techniques and for making any progress with existing projects.
There are so many useful books which have images and descriptions of the various stitches, but often you need to see someone’s hands doing it for it to make sense. Several pattern designers now have excellent videos of their projects, and the different techniques involved, and seeing how useful these were, I had the idea to create a video stitch bank of some of the most common stitches and techniques that our members were encountering. Luckily, the committee agreed and #40lacestitches was born.
We considered producing this just for Wolds members but wanted it to be a legacy project for the lacemaking community to benefit from too so have shared it on our Instagram, Facebook and YouTube, using the hashtag #40lacestitches. The plan is to release two videos per week between June and October 2025.
Hearing that bobbin lacemaking is now an endangered craft in the UK gave me even more impetus to get the project launched. In recording these stitches, we are preserving the techniques for others to learn from and raising awareness of the craft, showing that lace stitches aren’t always as intimidating as they first appear.
We started a list of the stitches and techniques we wanted to cover and asked our members to contribute their suggestions too. I’ve grouped them into categories of
- Basic stitches
- Grounds
- Spiders
- Common decorative features
- Fans
- Edges, starts and finishes
Recording the videos has been quite a process and there were a couple of times when I thought, ‘I wish I had someone to remind me how to do this stitch’, reinforcing to me how useful this resource was going to be – for me if for no-one else!
We’ve had some really positive comments on the videos so far and I’m looking forward to looking at the analytics to see how far and wide they’re viewed and who has found them useful. It’d also be fantastic to see similar stitch banks of other techniques and stitches, beyond what we’ve been able to include.
Cattern Lace 
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