I spent an interesting day at Luton Museum last week researching the decline and revival of the handmade lace industry in the nineteenth century. I was interested to read about Catherine Channer’s interviews with lacemakers at the end of that century and the differing attitudes they had to making Bucks point lace. She found that the older women, aged over seventy, had fond memories of making lace. Many of them told her how they loved making lace and would happily sit all day at their pillows. They told her it was nice, clean work and reasonably paid. One old lady told her she loved her pillow and said “When I was a girl I spent all my pocket money on my pillow; I loved to have it nice. I had some beautiful bobbins, bone ones with beads on them and names, and my pins had different coloured heads”. However talking to middle-aged women Miss Channer got a completely different response. Many of them said they hated lacemaking because it was badly paid and they wouldn’t want their children to do it. One reported that she hated it so much she burned all her bobbins. Another said “It’s an awful trade lacemaking” which is confirmed by another woman saying “If you go lacemaking you’ll never have salt to your porridge”. Why was there such a difference in attitudes? Mainly because the older women had been working at a time when handmade lace was valued and the patterns had been beautiful to work. The middle-aged ones only remembered an industry in decline, when they had poor patterns and thread and had to work hours under pressure for little reward. Today we are fortunate that lacemaking is a leisure or artistic activity, and we are not working with cheap materials under time pressure for a few pence, so like the older lacemakers we can enjoy our pillows and lacemaking.
Friday 3 May 2024
Wednesday 17 April 2024
‘Modern’ point lace
My 1882 edition of the Dictionary of needlework describes how to work this type of needlelace which was a popular pastime in the late nineteenth century. It describes point lace as any needlelace, except cut and drawn work, which is worked in buttonhole stitches on a parchment pattern. It goes on to explain that this modern type of point lace has been made since 1855, particularly in France where it is known as dentelle renaissance. The materials required are tracing cloth on which to draw the design, Toile Cire (which seems to be oil cloth) ‘to give firmness to the lace while in progress’ so I assume it is used as a backing cloth for the work, needles, linen braids and linen thread. A variety of linen braids were obviously available at the time but the book notes you could also make your own in bobbin lace if you preferred. It recommends using a fine thread such as Haythorne’s linen thread (I assume this is a brand name).
The first
step is to draw the outline of the lace onto the tracing cloth and this is the
suggested starting pattern. Then tack the braid loosely to the cloth. After
that overcast all the edges of the braid, drawing up the thread at the inner
edges of the curves so they sit flat. Then join the separate parts of the design
with bars as shown by passing a thread across a space three times, buttonholing
over the threads to the centre of the bar, where a picot is formed, and then continuing
by buttonholing the other half of the bar. The centre of the braid shapes can
then be filled with needlelace filling stitches. For beginners they suggest
using point de Bruxelles as the filling stitch, which is a series of interlocked
rows of loose buttonhole stitches. This seems quite a difficult stitch for
beginners, as it is hard to maintain a good tension, but of course Victorian
women all knew how to stitch and most were quite adept at something as well-known
as buttonhole stitch.
Friday 12 April 2024
A series of draughts for the Nottingham lace curtain machine
This set of four lace machine draughts are all variations on a theme of roses. They all have the same heading and a similar pattern along the base, while the main parts of the design are all variations on a series of roses, four-petalled flowers and leaves. I have previously seen a variety of designs produced this way and thought they were variations produced by the designer for the manufacturer to choose which one they preferred. I didn’t realise that manufacturers produced a variety of fairly similar designs for sale and therefore the designers were probably producing a suite of designs that complemented each other to make a range for that season.
These
draughts were painted by hand by a draughtsman based on the designers original
drawing. They are basically instructions converting the design into a pattern
that can be made on the Nottingham lace curtain machine. Each draught contains
the information for one pattern repeat and the places where the repeat begins
and ends are marked. The red and green rectangles indicate different operations
for the lace machine – generally red indicates back spool ties and green means Swiss
ties. The draughts also provide other information such as the fineness or point
size of the lace, its width and depth and whether the edging is overlocked or a
picot edging. Following this stage, the draughts would have been sent to the
card puncher who would have converted the information into a set of punched
Jacquard cards which would have been ‘read’ by the machine to make the lace. A
stamp on the draughts says ‘Lace textile designers draughtsmen 40 Upper
Parliament Street, Nottingham’ which suggests that the people making these
draughts were a specialist company of designer draughtsmen and not part of a
larger manufacturing company, as was often the case. They probably produced a
range of designs for several lace manufacturers.
Wednesday 3 April 2024
Lacemaking at the Great Exhibition 1851
Bucks point lace made from this draught won a gold medal at the Great Exhibition in 1851. According to Thomas Wright, Miss Elizabeth Clayson from Olney demonstrated lacemaking at the exhibition and was working on this pattern when Queen Victoria visited the show. The Queen asked the usual question ‘Are the different coloured bobbins a guide to which thread you turn over?’ and was told this was not the case. Whether she highlighted its similarity to tatting is not recorded! (These are the two observations everyone makes at lace demonstrations!)
The pattern
was designed by John Millward from Olney, a well-known Buckinghamshire
lace-making town, for the lace manufacturers Messrs. Copestake and Co. The Jury
report of the exhibition suggests that the medal was awarded to the company,
not the designer or lacemaker, and was for their complete range including Bucks
point, Honiton and tambour lace as well as embroidered muslin. Particular
mention is made of ‘very wide Buckinghamshire lace of fine quality’ which
presumably refers to this pattern. The lace was made in three widths and we are
not told which one Miss Clayson was working on when she met the Queen, I do
hope it was a smaller, more manageable, version and not the very wide one.
Wednesday 27 March 2024
Spring bobbin lace panels
It’s spring in the UK and the lovely colours in the garden have inspired me to produce a group of small lace panels. I’ve made some frames out of stiffened fabric, the sort used for interfacing when you’re making garments. I’ve already coloured them and am now filling the central openings with random bobbin lace in colours to complement the frames. As you can see I’ve finished one and am just about to begin on the second. I’m not quite sure how to mount them. I want to maintain the see-through quality of the lace but they are so small they would be overlooked hanging on a wall. Therefore I’m going to mount them on a white backing, so they are slightly raised from it and don’t lie flat. My dilemma is whether to mount them inside a box-type frame with glass in front of them or to have them on a block-type frame that stands out from the wall. They would be safer behind the glass but would probably make more interesting shadows if they stood out from the frame. I think I will have to experiment once they are all made and see what works best.
Wednesday 20 March 2024
Honiton lace and Flemish refugees
There is a tradition, repeated in Mrs Bury Palliser’s authoritative History of lace, that Honiton lace was introduced to Devon by Flemish refugees escaping persecution from the Duke of Alva in 1570. However, there is no primary evidence for such an influx of lacemakers and Palliser based her assertions on the appearance of Flemish sounding surnames in parish registers. H J Yallop in his doctoral thesis on the History of the Honiton lace industry questions whether these surnames actually had Flemish origins. He also notes that they were first introduced into England centuries before the invention of lacemaking and most are first found in Honiton registers in the seventeenth century. Yallop found no evidence for an influx of Flemish refugees in the late sixteenth century.
He also
argues that the obvious place for Flemish refugees to land in England would
have been London, Essex and East Kent, and there is evidence of refugees
settling in these areas. To travel along the English south coast as far as
Devon, passing several ports on the way, to land on an open beach in Devon
seems complete folly. Interestingly, Yallop notes that the first mention of refugee
lacemakers arriving in Honiton to start the lace industry in the sixteenth
century dates from a book on Devonshire history published in 1822, based on some
confused information received from a local Honiton lace manufacturer. In fact,
by the sixteenth century the Devon cloth industry was well established and the
area was home to many weavers, fullers, tuckers and dyers as well as
pointmakers. The latter made points, which were narrow braids or laces used for
tying parts of garments together, using a technique similar to bobbin lace
making. It therefore seems much more likely that the Honiton lace industry was
a natural development from the local weaving industry.
Wednesday 13 March 2024
Bobbin lace lappets
This beautiful bobbin lace lappet was made in Belgium in the eighteenth century. I found the image in an interesting old book entitled Old handmade lace by Mrs F Nevill Jackson, which was published in 1900. Lappets were long strips of lace or embroidery that were attached to women’s caps, hats or bonnets and then allowed to fall onto the shoulders, although there was a period when it was fashionable to pin the lappets to the top of the cap and another when they were tied under the chin. They were fashionable during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries but despite that I could find few images of women wearing them. The cap and lappets on the model above were displayed in the V&A Museum in London. They show round ended lappets attached to the sides of a fine fabric cap falling down the back. Alternatively side lappets could fall either side of the face or lappets could be attached to the back of the headwear and hang down the back of the gown. They varied in width, length and type of lace but always came in pairs. Both the lappets in the images have round ends but square ended lappets were also made. There are also examples of caps and lappets made entirely of lace (see an image in my blog post of 5 October 2022). Many lappets survive in museums and lace collections, probably because they were made to be closely examined and admired and are therefore exquisitely worked and so the owners found them too beautiful to dispose of. Also, once they were no longer fashionable, they were easy to detach from the headwear and small enough to keep in a drawer.