Christine Gibson

She studied at Battersea College of Education in the early 1970s, specializing in Needlework and Textile Design, for which she received a certificate with merit. Later she learnt the basics of lacemaking, but for the next 30 years she concentrated on dressmaking skills, returning to traditional lacemaking in the early 2000s. At college she always enjoyed working with textured threads in a free way and felt she would like to explore the possibilities of working in this way with lace bobbins. She therefore branched out into creative abstract work developing her own personal style of “Wild Lace” similar to free motion embroidery.

She uses photographs as patterns and colours in the shapes with threads, freely twisting and moving bobbins as needed until an abstract interpretation of the photo emerges. She is never fully sure what the finished piece will look like until it is completed, dealing with problems as they arise rather than by having a pre-set strategy. She finds the random twisting of threads and the slowly emerging shapes an exciting prospect to take her on into the unknown.

She has exhibited on a number of occasions with 98 Lace, once at Gawthorpe Hall and several times locally.