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Cassandra Hand, wife of the local Church of Ireland rector, introduced crochet lace-making to Clones at a time of great deprivation and hunger in the 1840s. She brought teachers from Kildare to teach a variation of Venetian Point Lace. The Italian lace, though very beautiful, was time consuming and the Irish women found that by using a crochet hook they could get the same effect in a much shorter time.

 A seven inch piece of lace could be crocheted in about twenty hours whereas the same piece would take about two hundred hours to sew! The Clones women reflected their own surroundings with motifs of shamrocks, harps, ferns, thistles, wild roses, marigolds, cartwheels and whitewash brushes, joined by the distinctive Clones Knot - ball made by turning the hook ten to twelve times around the thread.

Hundreds of such 'rolled dots' filled a piece of lace, joining the motifs. It is interesting that they have retained the grape and vine leaf motif as a thank you to the Italians for having given them the lace from which their own lace evolved.