Alison was taught to make bobbin lace whilst at school and has enjoyed both designing and making lace regularly since. During the last few years, she has become interested in developing her drawing and painting skills, using these to improve her lace designs. She is currently experimenting with hand drawn grids, and using knitting and embroidery threads to create contemporary lace suitable for wearing everyday.  Examples of Alison's work appear below.  ‘Ice’ is a sculpture designed and worked as a competition entry for the Royal Highland Show in 2008. The lace is traditional in style but mounted in a more contemporary way to suit the competition title, 'Ice'. ‘Frost’ is a panel worked in knitting and embroidery threads on a hand drawn grid.  ‘Autumn Leaves’ is a Bucks Point lace panel worked in synthetic silk with a hand dyed gimp showing the use of traditional techniques.  ‘Skeleton Leaf’ was designed after spending time studying and drawing the patterns of veins on skeleton leaves. The lace was worked freely using only an outline drawing, adding and removing bobbins as required and using a mixture of natural coloured threads left over from other projects.  The set of three necklaces were worked in mixture of embroidery threads, and knitting and weaving yarns. Alison was experimenting with the use of colour and texture in lace, and aiming to show how the colours could be blended together.  ‘Prague Fish’ was designed and worked whilst attending a lace course in Prague and was inspired by the work of the Czech lace designer, Milča Eremiášová. The lace is worked in mix of linen, wire and hand dyed textured yarns. For ‘Seed pods’, she spent time sketching seed pods and experimenting with ways of creating the shapes in lace starting with cut paper and tape. The finished lace was worked in linen, stiffened with starch and finished with old Czech glass beads found on a market stall in Prague.