Making the Chase Collar Lace
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Making Arwen's Lace Collar

V1.2 (November, 2004)

Here is a method to reconstruct the collar lace of Arwen's chase coat. Besides this, go on over to our summary about making the Chase dress and the Elven Grove section of our scrapbook and read up on the solutions folks chose.


Machine Embroidery Method

by Alwyn

I have never made machine embroidery lace, so the whole thing was just guesswork.  This took 7 hours to complete.

 then went and downloaded the huge picture of Arwen with the sword raised.  I cropped everything but her right collar, then erased everything around it and all the fabric in the little panels between the lace strands (the thing really started reminding me of stained glass as I did it).  I converted it to greyscale, enlarged it as much as I could to fit on one page, and printed it.  Because the collar is curved in the and doesn’t show the whole thing, I couldn’t just trace it off.

I started by tracing the collar shape onto wash-away stabilizer.   I copied the pattern onto the stabilizer by hand. 

Left and right collar pattern Alwyn's collar lace when attached

Once I had completed the whole pattern,  I placed the stabilizer in an embroidery hoop and started zig-zagging over the pattern, going back and forth on every line.  Sometimes the stabilizer tore and the machine tried to eat it, but all in all I got it to work. 

When the whole thing was done, I was afraid of just washing it in the sink and getting it tangled, so I lay it flat in the bathtub, turned on the shower, and then let it dry like that.  This worked perfectly. 

A couple strands were barely hooked or hadn’t been hooked at all, but a needle and thread fixed those.  Then I hand-stitched the lace to the very edge of the bodice piece, just tacking it down every 1.5 inches or so.  I left the rest to float on the fabric.
 

Check out Alwyn's chase dress here: http://www.geocities.com/athene1130/Chase_Coat.html


Extra tips

straight stitch over the design first, turning corners in different directions on the second pass, so that there is a skeleton of thread holding it together inside.

== Sarah


LOTR Home | Up | Gloves & Boots | Sword & Kit | Making the Chase Outfit | Making the Buckle | Altering 9891 Pattern | Making the Chase Collar Lace
Angel Dress | Chase Outfit | Bridge Dress | Farewell Dress | Dream Gown | Hope Dress | Requiem Outfit | Mourning Gown | Cranberry Gown | Blood Red Dress | Coronation Gown | Midnight Cloak | Arch Dress | Lavender Bead Dress | Rose Dress | Battle Outfit | White Weta Gown | Arwen's Things


This page was last updated 04/22/08