Needlelace

 Vascular surgery is founded on some lacemaking techniques and so it seemed obvious that I should be showing a senior vascular surgeon how to do a single brussels stitch. The focus was on the importance of tension of thread and spacing of stitches in the cordonnet. With this stitch you also need to go backwards with every alternate row. Unlike knitting where you turn the work over and always work from left to right (if right handed) with needlelace you have to turn the stitch. This is where all my insistence of using the less dominant hand and thinking about things differently comes into play.

   I had focused on embroidery stitches which have similar hand movements or techniques so that the muscle memory was there to cope with the mental rigour of the exacting repetition of lacemaking. There is little room for mistakes with needlelace as it is not always easy to unpick and the thread must not run out mid row .You must be thinking ahead to observe the condition of the thread and all thread ends must be hidden away and evenly hidden away at that !
  The twisting of the thread must be kept in mind and it was the revelation to some surgeons that a quarter turn to the needle every few stitches keeps the thread from buckling or twisting which began this project. Most embroiderers can just let the needle spin out when it becomes too twisted to work with but when that is not possible you turn the needle 'back'. This is also useful when you have a patient! but it is not taught as standard. This is referred to by Prof. Kneebone as 'reciprocal illumination' and is the gold of this project that we are looking for.