Welcome to LaceNews! This blog, which began in August 2010, is a resource for handmade lace researchers, collectors, makers, and other enthusiasts. The primary emphasis is on bobbin and needle laces with other techniques examined, but less frequently. My aim is to post timely information in a simple, clear format on subjects such as:
Original articles and editorials
Interviews with fascinating lace people
Events such as lace days, demonstrations, conferences and workshops, etc.
General information on various lace organizations, from local to international
Lacemaking competition information
Profiles of significant lace collections in museums
Lace-related exhibitions – permanent, rotating, and special topic
Internet lace-related web site information
Publication announcements and LaceNews book reviews
Lace and lace-related items for sale including fast Ebay alerts
Notifications of upcoming lace-related auctions
Job and internship opportunities
Stolen items
Information of interest to the community or news that people would like to publicize
The blog postings are organized in categories listed at the righthand side of the main page for easy access. For event announcements, I will attempt to list them in the order of the date of the event. However, due to the difficulty of doing this in WordPress, it may take a few days to get newly posted events in the correct order. A better way to look at lace events is to click on the “Lace Event Calendars” tab at the top of the page. This takes you to a page with individual calendars for each month. Events highlighted on the calendars have posts on the main blog. I’m working hard to get posts for every single event, however it isn’t always straightforward.
I have enabled Wordpad’s Subscriber option, which allows people to subscribe to the blog and receive postings individually or collected over several days. There are a number of options from which to choose. Some readers have asked about privacy should they subscribe. I wrote to Wordpad and received the following reply: “No, their emails are never shared. WordPress does not spam, nor does it sell or loan its list out to anyone who does.” Note that I often revise postings after they are published, as new ideas strike or to make corrections. So even though you will get the original posting by email in your subscription, there can often be a later edition on the main blog.
A summary of the first year’s activities on LaceNews can be found at
https://lacenews.net/2011/08/29/august-29-2011-the-one-year-anniversary-of-lacenews/
Below is a map of places that access the LaceNews blog (counted as number of ‘views’) from Feb 25, 2012 to April 7, 2014. This is total number of views in each country. However, if you normalize by the population of each country, the top number of views in order come from Belgium, Spain, UK, Turkey, Canada, Australia, the Netherlands, USA, Italy, France, Japan, Germany, Russia, India.
Turkey??? and North Africa? It appears there’s a lot more interest in the knotted Mediterranean laces than we realize.
Thanks for visiting!
LaceNews 
A wondeful idea and thank you for all the time these ventures take
Thank you so much! I promise to work hard to make this a success. Laurie
I would like to know how can I post an event to this site.
Lise
You can send an email to lacenews@gmail.com and I will post the information for you. That also gives me the chance to ask you questions if about your event if anything is unclear. Since the blog is so new I’m still developing formats for announcements. Hopefully I’ll find a way to allow outside posts in the future. Thanks, Laurie
Now that LaceNews has been up for about 4 months and does not seem to be ignored (just passed 10,000 views!), I’d like to make a few comments.
What I am primarily aiming for is a magazine format, where I can discuss current events and specialized topics. I find it much better to do an in-depth focus on one subject, rather than to try and explain all of lace in one post. This also allows me to research some rather obscure topics that have long been ignored in lace literature. Frequency of posting is also important – I find it better to post something small often than something large with a gap of several weeks.
I very much like the blog format. It allows fast publication, and also gives the opportunity for the author to make changes with very little trouble. Comments are also very welcome – I am still vetting these. I am not after a chat room, there are other forms that do that much better than LaceNews. LaceNews has also been a very valuable tool to work out some techniques for my web site – which will hopefully be published later in 2011.
Then there is the problem of persistence. The reader will certainly note that I use a lot of web references, which are fragile and can disappear any time. In examining regular web sites, I find that this can be extremely annoying, but in a fast-moving blog, the tolerance is higher. In my own web site which I have been working on for over two years, there are virtually no web references. In LaceNews I am still trying to work out the persistence options. For example, I now include a thumbnail of pieces for sale on the Ebay Alerts. The Ebay listings will disappear after three months, and there’s nothing to be done about it. I am also looking into archived web sites like Wayback Machine, but this is a work in progress.
Thanks again to all the LaceNews readers, you make my life very interesting!
Laurie
You have a wonderful collection of information on lace. It will be great to have you speak at our Quilt Guild Meeting.
Seems interesting and useful.
Thank-you for giving me this opportunity to investigate lace from the Czech Republic. My sister-in-law is pure Czech. Her father was from the town of Vnorovy. I would love to find a traditional pattern from there.
Thanks!