Stitched QR codes and what they can reveal

 This embroidered QR code links through to my website when you read it with a smartphone. However I first became interested in using QR codes as a way of hiding information in plain sight in a decorative way. The idea being that the message could easily be overlooked in the same way as domestic textiles and their makers often are. I sometimes hide text within lace patterns but QR codes can contain much more information in a smaller space. QR codes do have to be quite exact though for the camera on a smart phone to recognise them. My first attempts were made in black bobbin lace but they were not reliable enough to work every time. I tried working the codes at an angle so the squares were cloth stitch diamonds and alternatively with the squares as tallies, but neither worked very well. I also experimented with crochet squares but they became too large for the backgrounds I wanted. I then tried cross stitch embroidery straight onto my background net but that wasn’t reliable either. Eventually I found that cross stitch embroidery on counted thread fabric was the most effective way of producing the QR codes.

This curtain Insider information contains many coded messages that together form a narrative about the domestic environment. The words ‘Help me’ are stitched in human hair on to the curtain, which also includes an embroidered QR code. The code can be read to reveal the words ‘Escape while you can’ while the human hair contains the DNA of the seamstress. Combined with the veil of the curtain they seem a cry for help and a warning to others. Both types of embroidery reference Victorian domestic needlework, such as samplers and mourning brooches, and hint at a gothic tale of confinement and control.

Lace curtain designs by Marcel Tuquet

 

These lovely curtain designs were made by Marcel Tuquet, a lace curtain designer working at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. He was a prolific designer and most of his designs include floral images, but whether this was his preference or he was responding to the fashions of the time I don’t know.

These images all come from a folio of his designs, which was published in about 1900 by Christian Stoll of Plauen. Rather than being catalogues for retailers or householders who were planning to purchase curtains these folios were aimed at designers in the European textile industry to inspire them and give an idea of current trends. Doodles and small drawings on the reverse of some pages suggest that they were used by designers for this purpose.

Lace curtains at this time were generally quite large and floral designs were very popular. In fact a large part of the training for designers included drawing flowers and plants either from real life or from other designs.

These designs were not meant to be copied exactly but mainly to provide inspiration and you can see how a designer might take an element from the border of one design for example and use it with the style of flowers in another, incorporating the trellis bars from a different design. The images shown here were all printed in the folio as they are shown here, with the border along the left hand side, but you can see how some of them could easily be rotated by ninety degrees and used as smaller curtains or even as the lower border of larger ones.

For most lace curtains we have no idea who the designer was or when they were produced so to have these folios of designs by a named designer is unusual and very special. It also shows us just a glimpse of the astonishing number of different designs an individual designer could produce and introduces us to the amazing skill of Marcel Tuquet.

Lace in fashions from 1873

 

These illustrations depict the latest fashions from an 1873 issue of The Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine. This magazine was one of the most popular fashion magazines of the time. It had been founded by the entrepreneurial publisher Samuel Beeton in 1852 and was aimed at the middle class market (his wife Isabella’s famous book Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management was also hugely popular). By 1873, hooped crinoline underskirts were no longer fashionable and instead wide skirts were worn flat at the front and looped up at the sides and back to form a bustle, often with a pad of horsehair tied round the waist to pad out the fuller shape at the back. Swags, folds and pleats of fabric were swathed over the skirt and train. As you can see, the layers were trimmed with lace, ruched ribbons and embroidery. Some gowns were also trimmed with flounces of taffeta printed with lace-like designs, the edges of which were often scalloped or pinked to give the appearance of lace, although I think these illustrations depict machine-made lace frills.

This image, from the same issue of the journal, shows some fashionable accessories of the time. Hair was dressed high on the head and trimmed with small hats, ribbons, lace and artificial flowers. The small lace jacket also shows how lace fabric was cleverly cut to make use of its scalloped edging and accentuate the openings of the bodice and sleeves. Doctors were quick to condemn all these fashions as dangerous to health. Mainly because of the corseting required to achieve a tiny waist, but also because the bunched up skirts, high heels, and elaborate headwear tended to pitch the body forwards in a bent shape making walking difficult. Fashion has always been about appearance though not health or practicality!

 

Duchesse lace

In about 1850, Belgian lacemakers began making lace without an integral net ground; at the time it was called guipure lace. This type of lace was already being made elsewhere, for example in Honiton in England, and consisted of sprigs of bobbin lace joined together by fine lace bars. It’s greatest advantage was that numerous workers could be employed on the lace at the same time. Some made the sprigs, or motifs, and others assembled and joined them together, meaning that bigger items of lace could be made much more quickly compared with what one lacemaker working alone could achieve.

The finest type of Belgian lace in this style soon became known as ‘point Duchesse’ in honour of Marie-Henriette, the Duchess of Brabant. Marie-Henriette is an interesting woman, she had had a happy childhood in Austria, and was an excellent horse rider and musician. However, her marriage to Leopold the Duke of Brabant was very unhappy. They were incompatible and married against both their wishes when she was 16 and he was 18. They became king and queen of Belgium in 1865 and had three daughters and a son who died when he was 10. When Marie-Henriette died in 1901 they were living apart and Leopold came to her funeral with his mistress.

Those of you with keen eyes will have noticed that the lace in these images is not solely bobbin lace, like Honiton lace, but also incorporates some needle lace. According to Santina Levey’s book Lace: a history there were two main types of point Duchesse: Duchesse de Bruxelles and Duchesse de Bruges. The first type was made with fine bobbin lace flowers incorporating raised work, which is the raised outlining around the edge of the petals. It was also embellished with needle lace in the ‘point de gaze’ style, which is a very fine needle lace incorporating raised work, picots and small circular couronnes. Duchesse de Bruges was a coarser style and never included needle lace, therefore we can assume that this lace is the Duchesse de Bruxelles type. Levey also notes that Duchesse de Bruxelles lace was never a dominant fashion lace but was widely worn, mainly in small items such as cuffs and collars, like the one in the images.  

Saint Catherine: patron saint of lacemakers

 

Saint Catherine is the patron saint of spinners and the lacemakers affiliated themselves to her because of the similarities between their crafts. Her feast day is the 25th of November and it was a holiday known as Catterns in many English lacemaking districts, especially in Northamptonshire, Bedfordshire and Buckinghamshire. Villages celebrated the day in different ways. For example, in Bedfordshire, the people of Ampthill brewed special home-made drinks and baked Cattern cakes made of dough and caraway seeds, while those in Poddington ate their cakes with tea and then danced to fiddle music and ate a ‘great apple pie’. The lacemakers of Wendover in Buckinghamshire called the day Candle day because it was the first day of the autumn on which they started to make lace by candlelight. They also celebrated by cooking and eating ‘wigs’, which were round cakes containing caraway seeds that resembled gingerbread, and drank ‘hot pot’, which was made with warm beer and a splash of rum all thickened with beaten eggs.

As well as feasting and dancing to the music, the children played games such as apple bobbing and jumping the candlestick. There were different ways of jumping the candlestick but in one version the children danced in a circle around the lit candle singing ‘Jack be nimble, Jack be quick, Jack jump over the candlestick’. The name of each child was inserted in the rhyme, and when their name was used they had to jump over the candlestick without extinguishing the light. Many of the candlesticks would have been about 65 cm high and with girls wearing long petticoat dresses the potential for accidents seems very high, but I have not seen any reports of injuries or burns. In some places the festivities ended with the ringing of the church bells or lighting Catherine wheels but Thomas Wright, who recorded all this information, says that the custom of using the fireworks died out in the 1890s.  

Campaign promoting lace sales after World War II

Browsing through a 1919 edition of the American trade magazine Lace and Embroidery Review I was intrigued by an initiative to revive lace and embroidery sales in the aftermath of the Second World War. To encourage sales The Lace and Embroidery Trade, based in New York, proposed a week long series of events and displays, at the end of April, to promote lace and embroidery throughout the United States. The article promises those reading it, who would have been lace buyers or retailers, that ‘the success of the event is assured’ because fashion magazines, the trade press, newspapers, department stores, specialist shops and the lace trade are all working together to make it so. It just relies on the reader playing their part by advertising in their local newspaper, making beautiful window displays and generally freshening up their department. The article continues by asserting ‘We feel confident you will co-operate to the limit of your ability’ and ‘will enlist the support of your ready-to-wear buyer’ as well as other department heads to display lace trimmed merchandise. No pressure then!

Luckily the Review seems to realise that its readers might need a little help with all this advertising and promoting so it provides templates for them. For example the illustrations above are all available either free or at cost if electroplate images are required.

There are also suggestions for how to use the images for windows cards or newspaper advertising, with appropriate layout designs and text. I think this is a very clever idea as it meant the quality of the advertising would be high, it would also be standardised throughout the country so would have brand appeal and thus link all the events together. The Review also included a page of endorsements from various lace retailers agreeing to take part in the lace week and reinforcing what a great idea the whole event would be, thus encouraging more readers to join in and become a part of it.

Following the lace week, the magazine included images of some acclaimed window displays from New York as well as more letters from those who had taken part and seen their sales increase. The initiative seems to have been successful in its aim of promoting lace sales, which had fallen during the war. In fact one reader from Chicago states that ‘this is the biggest lace and embroidery day we have had in three years and things look encouraging’.

Splinter net lace from World War II

 

I saw these examples of splinter net in the lace exhibition at the Castle Museum in Nottingham. They were made by Tatham and Co in the 1950s but are of the type produced in World War II. Splinter nets were applied to windows to stop the glass shattering in the event of bomb explosions. Even small bomb explosions can cause glass to break into sharp fragments and flying or falling glass caused many wartime injuries.

These nets not only protected those inside the house but also people walking past in the street. Instead of splinter net, some householders used strips of paper glued on to the window in a grid or criss-cross pattern. Ideally the strips were fixed to both sides of the window, with those on the outside matching the pattern on the inside. Households were allocated rolls of gummed brown paper for the purpose, which had gum on one side that had to be moistened to make it sticky.

I was surprise by the variety of nets and wondered whether they were used for different purposes. Some of them are simple woven nets while others are patterned. Some are fairly dense, and would have obscured the light making the rooms inside quite dark, and there are wartime accounts saying that some people chose not to use splinter nets because of this reason. I also wondered how householders kept the nets clean, as dirty windows and nets would also have obscure the light, although perhaps that wasn’t a concern if you were in an area that was subject to regular bombing.