Having completed Karen Blum’s famous oval Torchon mat (must be the most beautiful oval edging ever), I was faced with mounting it on fabric. This is how I went about it:
- Trace the shape from the footside of the pricking onto tissue paper.
- Check this tracing against the lace to see if there was any shrinkage and adjust the traced line accordingly.
- Tack the tissue paper to the (washed) fabric.
- Carefully machine around the traced line with a thread that matched the fabric (it’s going to stay there).
- Tear away the tissue paper, leaving a machined line as a guide for my handstitching.
- Tack the lace to the fabric.
- Hand stitch all the way round, using a very shallow 3 sided stitch and using the machine stitches as a guide to stitch length.
- Trim off excess fabric, leaving enough to turn back “plus a bit”
- Finger press the fabric back and tack.
- Hand stitch all the way round again, using either a 3 sided or a 4 sided stitch.
- Cut way remaining excess fabric.
For how to do the 3 sided or 4 sided stitch, see http://tinyurl.com/y6lx52ey at the Lace IOLI site.