There are many beautiful lace designs available for machine embroidery. Although the designs are dense with thread, they do need tulle to hold together. Heavy weight water soluble stabilizer is perfect to keep the tulle stable in the hoop while the design is stitched out. (Please refer to an article on STABILIZERS elsewhere on this blog.)

Here are the materials you will need to machine embroider lace designs.
•    Embroidery machine (embroidery machines can be purchased at a discount price from embroiderysoftware.co.za) ;
•    A design  (CREATIVE DRAWings offers simple step by step instructions on how to create the design of your choice);
•    Tulle;
•    Heavy Water Soluble Stabilizer and
•    Embroidery Thread and Bobbin Thread - It is preferable to have a bobbin thread that matches your embroidery thread.
 
Decide where and how you are going to use the finished product.  This will help you decide on the colour tulle you will need.  If, for example, you had planned on hand sewing these snowflakes to a cream coloured shawl, you would use cream colored tulle.  If you had planned to use the snowflakes as a Xmas tree ornament, the colour of the tulle would be the same as that of the thread:  cream for a gold thread and white for white. (Refer to an article on COLOUR in embroidery elsewhere on the blog)

Sandwich a layer of tulle between a piece of heavy weight water soluble stabilizer.

Place the sandwich in your machine hoop keeping all layers taunt and smooth.
 
With the sandwich taunt and smooth, stitch out the lace design.
 
Remove the stitched out design from the hoop and trim away all excess stabilizer and tulle.
 
Although the tulle will rip away from dense stitching, it leaves a frayed edge. It is much neater and safer to use a small embroidery scissors to trim the edges.

Dissolve and rinse the water soluble stabilizer away.

Use the lace as desired.