Sewing Tutorials | Patching Lace

I've noticed a lot of interest in sewing with lace around the internet lately and there seems to be a bit of trepidation in working with it. Lace can be intimidating - it's usually more expensive than other fabrics, especially as you get into high quality lace - which can cause a bit of stress during the cutting process. Lace also often comes in odd widths, such as 36" wide, which can make cutting your garment difficult or impossible. Luckily this is pretty easy to remedy by patching the lace together to essentially build more fabric. I ran into this problem the other night while making a lace top and decided to do a little tutorial on how to patch lace together. Here goes!

For this top I was short about 5" on the back hem. You'll want to try to place the area needing to be patched together in the most non-conspicuous place possible. Usually in the back near the hem is good.

Take a bit of the lace you have leftover from cutting and align the motifs, pinning them together to match one on top of the other.

Make sure you choose the absolute closest thread color you can find. This will make all the difference in the world. Then begin sewing around the top edge of the layered motifs.

You'll be left with something like this. Trim the under layer out around the stitching line. Most lace doesn't fray so you won't need to worry about this except in very rare instances.

You'll be left with something like this. The stitching line is above the scissors, it's pretty hard to find unless you're looking for it specifically. Even then it's a minute of a search. Just keep patching on lace motifs until you've built the requisite amount of lace for your pattern piece.

Once you're done patching, lay the pattern piece back on top of the fabric and trim off the extra lace and continue sewing as instructed.

Hope you found this helpful and, as usual, if you have any questions just let me know! I'll be back with more info and photos on this particular top as well as a book review on the pattern soon! In the meantime beach dancing photos with my friend Matthew will have to suffice.