Stitching, Stitching

There are many ways of dressing lace. This is one.

Using Zonta Wires to Dress Lace

These are the Zonta wires I used to block my tea cloth. They are thin, stainless steel wires used for tig welding. They came shipped in a PVC pipe with covers on the end, so they can be stored there when not in use. There are many in the tube, but you probably can’t see them well. Some are lying beside the tube.

This is my Rose of England tea cloth stretched on the Zonta Wires. If you look on the left and at the lower right, you can see where the individual wires overlap slightly. I put a fabric cutting board on my floor, and then I put a couple of terry towels over that. On top of all that I stretched the tea cloth. You can see that my cutting board buckled a bit from the pinning and stretching, but it doesn’t affect the outcome at all. In some places the doily is so taut that it actually rises off the towels.

The cloth is wet and starched before it is stretched. In this closeup of the tea cloth on the Zontas, I hope you can see how I’ve threaded the Zonta wire through two openings in the lace edge for each scallop and pulled and pinned the wires down with T-pins. After the whole cloth was pulled out as round as I could get it, I went back and pinned out the individual lace openings around the scallops. Then I turned a fan on the whole thing and left it. It was dry in just a few hours. You can get information for ordering your own Zonta wires at this URL. Click on the name to go there. Zonta Wires

Check out my Knitting Doilies page to see how the tea cloth turned out. Look for Rose of England.