I made a little bitty piece of lacis for the pin pillow and learned several very important things:
1) Yes, stretching it on a frame is important!
I decided to just stretch the netting in my fingers as I worked the pattern. Bad idea. The finished piece is...kinda lumpy. It's not as easy to control the tension as you work the pattern into the net and it's also much harder to get all the stitches in the correct place.
The second reason it's a bad idea? Dirt. I handled the piece a lot more and it's beautiful creaminess is decidedly grey in spots.
Live and learn (and wash itty bitty pillows!)
2) Cotton batting doesn't like having you squish it into a tiny space and then stick pins into it.
Next time I will try looser filling, but I suspect cotton is not the material of choice when it comes to filling pin pillows, mainly because the glass-headed pins I bought keep bending when I try to stick them into it!
3) It would have been a much better idea to graph out the pattern I wanted.
If I had I might have realized that my original idea for a pattern wasn't going to work before I stiched it up. This tiny little piece of lace is positively riddled with joined sections from figuring out what I was doing on the fly.
Still, all in all it looks pretty good.
The needle case is much more of a work in progress. It's got a little pocket for a needle threader and two leaves of felt with a selection of tapestry and general sewing needles. I'm thinking I'll work the edges with needle lace and add a button to close it. And/or I might add some white work embroidery...
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