French lace from ebay France!

I've been making various little goodies using vintage and antique machine lace, recently. I began with a collar my mum had passed on to me, and when I'd used it up, I realised I had to get buying. My only lace at home is the exquisite hand made stuff I've collected over the years, and that's not for crafting! You can see two examples in my title header picture.Anyway, I decided to look on my local ebay (ebay.fr), for whatever was acceptable quality and cheap postage.And I discovered a flaw with ebay lace buying: the photos!OK, this tiny one is just one that I took from the site after the purchace - there was a bigger one originally. But I honestly was unable to tell the style, quality or nature of the lace from the photo. It was just a good bargain and some interesting shapes so I snapped it up. It arrived and turns out to be the hand made needlepoint lace shown in the two photos above! I really like it, and I am going to be able to use it for crafts, but I won't cut it up - far too lovely and hand crafted.

So I am basically reduced to treating ebay as a kind of brantub/lucky dip thing - put on a bid of a euro or two and you have no idea what's going to be sent to you! The collar above turned out to be made of extraordinarily fine tape lace.Come on, vendors, I can take a photo of it which shows its quality, so surely you can, too? I think they probably don't really value this stuff, or know the difference between hand and mass-produced lace anyway.

But of course I can reap the benefits of that, I hope. This one, which is really pretty, turns out to be of much poorer quality. Various styles of machine lace put together with net.But it does sit very sweetly!It's one I'll be happy to cut up, though, as I won't be desecrating the work of an earlier craftswoman.

So, what did we do on our sunny Wednesday evening?

Played 3 crazy games of Consequences. Look at the lovely difference in handwriting styles there! Primary school teacher-meets French education-meets mild dyspraxia!I'm alternating between posting French and Scottish news all this week, in the run up to my 100th post 'Auld Alliance' Giveaway. This is post 97, so it won't be long now...