How to Rhinestone Lace

The next way to use rhinestones is using them on lace. It helps to define the shape of the flower and it helps on stage to really bring sparkle to your costume when the lights hit your costume. It is a fantastic way to take a beautiful lace costume to the next level and increase the score on your costume.

Supplies:

Lace dance costume or lace trim
Rhinestones
E6000 Glue in a Tube or in a Syringe
Toothpicks
Two paper plates

Directions:

Choosing Your Materials
There are different types of lace fabric and/or trim. When you are already have a lace costume, you do not have to make any choice of fabric. When it comes to lace trim, you have to choose the trim you want. The next item to chose will be the color and size of the rhinestones. Some people prefer to be subtle with the rhinestones. Others prefer to use colored rhinestones to make a different statement. When choosing lace yardage or trims, you will notice that some of them already have sequins on them. If you do not want sequins, try to avoid the lace that has them. If you end up with sequins on your lace, do not worry. You can remove them. However, it is more work. In our demonstration, we show lace yardage and two types of lace trim.

Preparation Before Gluing Down Rhinestones
When rhinestoning lace, you want to carefully look at the pattern. There are many very different lace pieces. Some pieces, both trims and yardage, already have sequins on them. If you do not want to remove the sequins, then leave them in place. Just add the rhinestones in the areas around the sequins. You also have the option of removing the sequins. This option would work with lace trim but would not be practical with lace yardage. There would just be too many sequins to remove all of the sequins from lace yardage.

We are showing you two different lace trims. One trim has a “wave� pattern to it. With that lace trim (with or without sequins), you would just place the rhinestones along that trim edge. The number of rhinestones used will depend on how many rhinestones you have.

Gluing Down the Rhinestones
One trim is a scalloped lace flower trim. Start with gluing rhinestones in the center of the flowers at the tips of the scallops. Put stones in all of the bigger flowers at the tips, then move on to the smaller flowers.

Depending on your preference and the size of the flowers, you could use bigger rhinestones in the bigger flowers and smaller rhinestones in the smaller flowers. You could create a lot more detail by putting rhinestones in every petal of the flower rather than just the center. Another choice would be to put three or four small rhinestones in each flower. Again, that will all depend on the number of rhinestones you have and your preference.

When it comes to the lace fabric, you want to take a look at it and guestimate how many stones you have and how many you will need. When working with yardage, make sure you have lots of rhinestones. Some people just fill the yardage up until they run out of stones but we like to have more of a pattern. On the lace in our demonstration, we are going to put at least three rhinestones on each side of the flowers. After putting three on each side, we decided to add a few more stones and put one in the center. Now, we can do every large flower in this manner or if we do not have as many stones or we are concerned about the weight of the material, we can stagger the flowers that have this many rhinestones. Because we want a lot of splash, we are going to put a stone in the center of all of the small flowers. Some people prefer to be a little more subtle and use plain rhinestones and others prefer to use various colored rhinestones.

Remember, nobody is going to be looking at the rhinestones up close. So, if you want some drama to it you are really going to have to put a lot of rhinestones on the flowers. You can then repeat that pattern on all of the flowers. It is really that easy.

You do want to keep in mind, though, that the more rhinestones y0u put on lace fabric the more drama you will have but the weight of the rhinestones will also make the lace heavier and therefore affect the weight of the costume which will in turn affect the movement of the costume.

Something that is important to remember when gluing down the rhinestones, is that the glue will seep through the lace. Consequently, you need to make sure you put sheets of paper or paper plates underneath the fabric so that the glue does not leak through and cause the layers of fabric to stick together.

Our choice of glue is the E6000 in the tube. The technique we prefer is to squirt some glue out on a paper plate and then take a little dot of the glue on the tip of a toothpick. We then tap the back of the rhinestone with the glue and flip the rhinestone over and put the rhinestone in place.