Lace-making

. View 3D animations of juvenile and adult lion skulls -- both inside and out -- at Digimorph.org. Knitted lace includes Shetland lace, such as the "wedding ring shawl", a lace shawl so fine that it can be pulled through a wedding ring.
. Crocheted lace includes Irish crochet and Filet crochet. Female ligers and female tigons are fertile and can produce offspring if mated to either a pure-bred lion or a pure-bred tiger. Tatted lace is made with a shuttle or a tatting needle. Tigons are also more difficult to produce as male tigers are less attracted to lionesses because of their smaller size and are thought to have difficulty with recognizing lioness breeding cues.

Macramé and Tatting are knotted laces. Tigons are not as common as ligers because they are not as visually impressive, thus they do not draw as much attention from audiences. Tape lace can make the tape in the lace as it is worked, or use a machine- or hand-made textile strip formed into a design, then joined and embellished with needle or bobbin lace. Like male ligers, male tigons are sterile, and they all have both spots and stripes, with yellow eyes. Also known as Bone-lace. They can best be described as "housecat-like" in appearance, although with round ears. The pillow contains straw, preferably oat straw or other materials such as sawdust, insulation styrofoam or ethafoam. Because the male tiger does not pass on a growth-promoting gene and the lioness passes on a growth inhibiting gene, tigons are often relatively small, only weighing up to 150 kilograms (350 lb), which is about 20% smaller than lions.

The bobbins, turned from wood, bone or plastic, hold threads which are woven together and held in place with pins stuck in the pattern on the pillow. The tigon is a cross between the lioness and the male tiger. As the name suggests, Bobbin lace is made with bobbins and a pillow. Male ligers are sterile, but female ligers are often fertile. Cutwork, or whitework, is lace constructed by removing threads from a woven background, and the remaining threads wrapped or filled with embroidery. Ligers share some qualities of both their parents (spots and stripes) however they enjoy swimming, a purely tiger activity, and they are always a sandy colour like the lion. The finest antique needle laces were made from a very fine thread that is not manufactured today. It is said that ligers do not stop growing and will grow constantly through their lifespan, until their bodies cannot sustain their huge size any longer, reaching up to half a tonne.

Some purists regard Needle lace as the height of lace-making. Because the lion passes on a growth-promoting gene, but the corresponding growth-inhibiting gene from the female lion is not present, ligers are larger than either parent. Some are the most time-consuming but the most flexible of the lace-making arts. The liger originates from mating a male lion and a tigress. Some types can be made more quickly than the finest of bobbin laces. These two new breeds are called ligers and tigons. Needle lace is made using a needle and thread. Lions have also been known to breed with their close counterparts, tigers (most often Amur), while in captivity to create interesting mixes.

A few modern artists makes lace with a fine copper or silver wire instead of thread. There have also been recorded attacks on humans by lions in captivity. Manufactured lace may be made of synthetic fiber. Some have speculated that they might belong to an unclassified species of lion, or that they may have been sick and couldn't have easily caught prey. Now lace is often made with cotton thread. The lions in both the incidents were all larger than normal, lacked manes and seemed to suffer from tooth decay. Originally linen, silk, gold, or silver threads were used. The Mfuwe and Tsavo incidents did bear some similarities.

The holes can be formed via removal of threads or cloth from a previously woven fabric, but more often lace the open spaces are created as part of the lace fabric. In folklore, man-eating lions are sometimes considered demons. Lace is a lightweight, openwork fabric, patterned with open holes in the work, made by machine or by hand. In both cases the hunters who slew the lions wrote books detailing the lions' "careers" as man-eaters. Lace-making is an ancient craft. Some of the more publicized cases include the Tsavo man-eaters and the Mfuwe man-eater. Knitted lace. While a hungry lion will probably attack a human that passes near, some (usually male) lions seem to seek out human prey.

Crocheted lace. Verneyi). Knotted lace. l. Tape lace. melanochaita) and the kalahari lion (P. Bobbin lace. l.