Preparing Lace for Invisible Seams

In the continuing adventure of making this wedding gown, I'm now up to the part of joining seams - without making a seam, a technique I've never done but am anxious to try. It's a beautiful technique. There is quite a bit of fabric allowance on one of the sides of each pair of seams. This is to allow for the overlapping of fabric. It's recommended that you cut around motifs when possible. This edge (below) happened to be the edge of where the border was cut off, more than I need but already there anyway.
The adjustments on the pattern are marked and I'm ready to mark the seam line on the lace.

The seam allowance is pinned back on the SA line and through the lace to make it stable. You can now see the edge where the stitching line is to be.

Next is to mark the stitching line using hand basting and a light colored thread such as pink.  A dark thread can leave "dark" lint in the lace.

The pattern pieces are removed and time to line up the sections of the gown.

The lace pieces are overlapped matching notches (marked with thread) and seam lines created by the pink thread stitching.

Then - pinned and basted together.

Next is to trim the overlapping seam into a pretty edge. This you do by cutting close to the corded lace and around the motifs.

Using a pair of very sharp, small, pointed scissors works best.  I'm a scissor "junkie" so finding something in my scissor stash was easy.

They are sharp and got the job done beautifully.

Stay tuned for next step of stitching the seams.