Lace-maker on the Honours list puts pupils before Palace

IT began as a hobby 40 years ago and has ended with a trip to the Palace - diary permitting.

Catriona Mason, 62, has told of her shock and delight at being made an MBE in the New Year's Honours list for services to lace-making.

Over the years, she has taught hundreds of people the craft and helped to establish classes in Currie and a summer school at Heriot-Watt University.

She now travels to share her expertise with students all over the UK and is set to meet the Queen to receive the honour - as long as the ceremony doesn't clash with her teaching time.

Miss Mason, known as Kitty to friends, said she was overjoyed. "I was somewhat taken aback. It's people saying that you're doing something good. I know those who make lace think I'm good, because I keep going round the country teaching them all, but to have it formalised is quite humbling."

She said she was looking forward to making the trip to London, although she didn't want to disappoint any students by visiting the Queen when she was due to be teaching. "We'll have to wait and see - it depends how the dates fit with my classes," she said.

Miss Mason, a retired occupational therapist who lives in Comely Bank, first took up lace-making at an evening class in Leeds in 1971.

She said: "I'd been doing something else, like pottery classes, and saw a lace pillow on display, and used to see the lace collars in Dutch paintings and think 'I wonder how you make those?' I went along and I got hooked straight away."

The next year she moved to Edinburgh, continuing her lace-making studies with the College of Craft Education Summer School in Leeds.

In 1978 she was helping two friends with their lace-making when one of them suggested she teach a class. She began a group at Currie Community High School, which is now continued by her friend Sue Clark.

Miss Mason also helped to establish the lace-making summer school at Heriot Watt University.

In 1983 she was one of a group of volunteers from the Edinburgh Lace Club who hand-made a set of lace jabot and cuffs to be worn by the-then Moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, Fraser McLuskey, when he met the Queen.

She now teaches every second Saturday in Fife, and offers weekend courses around the country. She said: "At the very first class, somebody from Inverness said would I go and teach there? I thought if teachers didn't travel, lace wouldn't get made and I've been going there ever since."

She said she thoroughly enjoyed the craft: "Lace-making is a kind of weaving where you've got the thread fixed at one end and the other end is free, and attached to bobbins. "It's only based on three stitches, but there seem to be limitless possibilities to create completely different patterns."

Miss Mason said she particularly loved to work with unusual designs and materials as well as traditional white threads. A current project features red roses on a black background, and she also works with materials such as wire and plastic laces known as scoobies.