Once you’ve learned the basic lace braid, you can start to be creative.

This one is a nice variation, almost like a normal french braid, but makes people look twice.

I started by lace braiding from above her left eye, going slightly to the right and picking up hair from the right.  When I had caught all the difficult fine baby hair from the front, I started heading left, and picking up hair strands from the left only. Then changed direction again to the right and picked up hair from the right into the lace braid, then left and finally right again to finish.

This was very quick as it didn’t require parting the hair in any way. Took me about 3 minutes. And it lasted really well, somehow lace braids always do.

And you can zigzag the other way as well. Start from behind the ear, lace braid heading towards the middle of her forehead, picking up hair from the left, after 4 or 5 stitches , turn slightly to the right and start picking up hair from the right, then turn towards the fore head again, and pick up hair from the left again…

 Zig zag until the left ear, turn and finish by lace braiding the rest of the hair by picking up hair from the right.

This one was slightly trickier, took me just over 5 minutes, but was really worth the effort. It lasted a couple of days, and survived our ultimate test: the swimming pool 🙂

And even if these don’t turn out quite right, they are a good way of practising lace braiding.