Queen Mary’s lace court train

 

Queen Mary was an avid collector of art and artefacts and her lace collection was the subject of an article in The Connoisseur magazine of June 1928. Pride of place in the collection went to the court train of Irish needlepoint lace that was made for her to wear at the Coronation Durbar in Delhi in 1911. The train was commissioned by a group of influential ladies from Belfast, including the lady mayoress, who set up a committee and raised funds for the work. There was little time between the King’s accession and the Durbar so the train had to be made in 6 months. The Presentation Convent of Youghal in County Cork was given the task, and it is reported that 60 skilled lacemakers work in relays through the day and night to make the lace on time. It was estimated that one lacemaker would have taken about 30 years to complete the task alone.

The pattern includes scrolls and flowers, including the may flower as a reference to the Queen who was known as Princess May before her coronation. The lace is made with a needle and thread and the work is basically made up of blanket stitches and their various combinations to form intricate patterns.

 This type of needlelace is suited to collaborative work because the individual motifs are made separately by the lacemakers and then assembled and joined together with more fine needlelace. Each worker has her own specialism, such a drawing out the patterns, laying down the outlining cord, working the stitches or assembling the motifs and joining them with net stitches. It is a huge achievement to have completed a work of such intricacy, accuracy and beauty in 6 months and we should marvel at the skill of the Irish lacemakers involved in the task.

Leaves and tallies in bobbin lace

 

Leaves and tallies in bobbin lace are very similar in construction but vary in shape. Tallies, leaves and lead-work are all made by plaiting small blocks of lace, usually with two pairs of bobbins. Tallies are square or rectangular, leaves are pointed at both ends, and lead-works generally join two trails and are rectangular in shape, but wider than they are long. To make a leaf the two pairs are worked together with a cloth stitch and then the second thread from the right is woven over and under the other three threads, back and forth, until the leaf is the required length. The secret to a good shape is to hold the passive threads wide apart as the weaving progresses, until the centre of the leaf is reached, and then gradually bring them close together again. To finish the leaf a pin is put up between the two pairs of thread and a final cloth stitch is worked.

Both leaves and tallies can be raised, which means they lie above the base layer, as seen here with the leaves above the half stitch diamonds This is done by keeping two pairs to the side, away from the main work, until the base layer has been worked. Then making the leaf or tally above the base and joining the pairs back into the main work at the point where the end of the leaf joins the base layer.

Raised tallies can also be rolled, which makes them into a small tight cylinder that looks like a small roll or bead on the top of the work. This can be done by making a tally with the central pairs in a piece of lace, then either raising it into a loop over a pin laid across the work, or winding it round the pin. The pairs used to make the tally are then placed back in their original position and the rest of the lace continues. As you can see from this contemporary lace, tallies can also be twisted, laid over each other or moved from one area of the work to another. They are great for adding interest, little points of colour and relief to a piece of work.

Early twentieth century lace cape

 

I saw this lovely lace cape in the Lace Gallery at Nottingham Castle. It dates from about 1900 and is made of silk gauze and machine-made lace, embellished with cords and soutache. Soutache is a narrow, flat, decorative silk braid which was often used to embellish dresses, mantles and smoking caps. It was also known as Russia braid and was sold in skeins in haberdashers for domestic embroidery projects.

Bold lace patterns, such as those made with Maltese lace or Irish crochet, were fashionable in 1900 and manufacturers made machine-made version in this style to compete with the handmade laces. However, a report from The Times newspaper in 1904 notes that the London store, Dickens and Jones, reported that their buyers were finding it difficult to source good quality handmade Maltese lace. This provided a gap in the market that the machine lace manufacturers were very happy to fill.

As you can see from this 1901 fashion plate, the S shaped figure was fashionable at the turn of the century. This was achieved by corsetry that pushed the bust forward, accentuated a tiny waist and pushed the bottom out. It resulted in a top heavy silhouette, so this cape would have covered the top half of the figure revealing the tiny waist and small hips below. The combination of lingerie materials and lace was also popular at this time for dresses, coats, hats and parasols, therefore this cape would have been the height of fashion.

Large scale bobbin lace with alternative bobbins

 

I started this bobbin lace a few weeks ago using an assortment of unusual bobbins. I posted about it at the time (19 March) and explained that I was using them mainly because I needed large bobbins that would hold long lengths of thread. The lace worked up quite quickly because of its large scale and I’ve now finished all 3 metres of it and am attaching it to a net curtain for a piece of work that will be exhibited in the summer.

The alternative bobbins all worked very well, including the old spools that I used for the ‘hairy’ paper thread and the ball of hemp thread that I secured with a rubber band to stop it unwinding. The main problem with the hemp thread was that it had a tendency to twist. I hoped that pinning it in place while I made the lace would be enough to straighten it and keep it where I wanted it, but I found that for the longer loops that wasn’t enough and now it’s off the pillow many of them have twisted again. They are supposed to represent sound waves and should therefore be straight so I will have to secure them individually to the curtain which is annoying as it’s giving me extra work. In contrast, the paper thread had a tendency to flatten, so the hairy bits didn’t protrude as much as I’d hoped, but I managed to solve that, as I worked, by teasing them out with a long pin after every few rows. I want them to be obvious because the work is based on a story in a book and I wanted to reference the link between the lace sound waves and the paper pages of the book. The good news is that the threads all lasted the entire length of the lace, including the hemp and the paper threads which I was worried might run out, so the only bobbins I had to rewind were the weavers. I’m pleased with the way the work is progressing so far and the next task is to embroider text on to the curtain. I’ll let you know how I get on with that in a few weeks’ time.

Brise bise lace curtains and blinds

 

Researching more brise bise curtains this week I came across these in a 1933 pamphlet of lace furnishings. Brise bise lace curtains were very fashionable in the early 1930s and were designed to hang across the lower half of a window. The name brise bise comes from two French words, briser meaning to break and bise meaning a light cold wind, so they are designed to stop a light breeze. All the examples in the booklet have an integral channel woven across the top of the curtain through which a rod or wire could be inserted for fixing them. Some of these channels are patterned but others are just plain weave and most have a scalloped lower edge. Brise bise curtains could be gathered along the rod or kept flat against the window and it may be that those labelled as blinds were designed to be used flat. However, it looks as if all the designs could be used either way depending on the preference of the householder.

The fruit design shown at the top is only available in one width (17 inches), but the design of flowers and trellis comes in three sizes (20, 31 or 38 inches). The smaller sizes are those usually associated with brise bise curtains; 38 inches seems quite large for a brise bise, but perhaps the idea was that you could have a combination of matching designs to fit a range of window sizes. The curtains were sold by the yard so would not be finished at the edges, just cut from the roll. Unfortunately there are no details of the manufacturers or the prices and I suspect those details were probably on an order form in the centre of the booklet which has been removed.

Another subversive doily

 

I’m delighted to have finally finished another doily in my subversive doily project. This is an ongoing project with no deadline but something I will write about and exhibit once I’ve made enough doilies to form a body of work. Because of that, other work with deadlines keeps interrupting and, in fact, having to start another large project gave me the incentive to finish this doily and clear the pillow I was working it on. The idea behind the subversive doilies is that they subvert the traditional idea of doilies as overlooked, undervalued domestic craft items by giving them a voice. The latest one incorporates the words 'f*** off’ in a Bedfordshire lace technique in the centre of the mat, which is surrounded by a circular edging of Eastern European style tape lace. I designed the doilies so that the wording is not immediately obvious and it is only after looking at them for a while that the viewer realises that they are more interesting than they first appeared and actually incorporate a message. In general, doilies are overlooked, considered old-fashioned and taken for granted, rather like the women who originally made them. These doilies represent those very skilled women whose work was undervalued and whose voice was not heard. They have a mind of their own and are speaking out!

The Battle of Britain commemorative lace panel

 

The 80th anniversary of the Victory in Europe day, following the second world war, seems an appropriate time to blog about the Battle of Britain commemorative lace panel. The large panel (it is 450 cm long and 163 cm wide) was made by the Nottingham lace company of Dobson and Browne between 1942 and 1946 to celebrate the famous air battle of 1940, which was a pivotal moment in the war. In 1940, Britain was the only major power opposing the Nazis and Adolf Hitler planned to invade Britain to bring an end to that final opposition. He knew that without a functional airforce an invasion of Britain would probably succeed. The German offensive began in July 1940 targetting airfields and cities and the British retaliated by bombing German sites.

The most intense battle occurred on 15 September when the Germans sent two waves of 500 aircraft across the English Channel. It resulted in the greatest defeat the German airforce had experienced and we know it as the Battle of Britain. Two days later Hitler cancelled the invasion plans although the bombing continued until May 1941.

The bombing was very destructive of lives and property and photographs of the bomb damage in London were used as the basis for the images in the panel. This panel depicts the damage to St Clement Danes Church, while the image above shows the dramatic moment a building collapses in Queen Victoria Street.

This depiction of St Paul’s Cathedral shows the undamaged building rising above the smoke and destruction of the Blitz and became an iconic image representing the resilience of London and Londoners. The commemorative panel was designed by Harry Cross, a professional lace designer, and includes eight images of bomb scenes as well as St Paul’s, a cottage and castle and the floral emblems of the commonwealth airforces that took part in the battle. It also includes a stylised image of the aircraft involved and an airman preparing for the battle as well as an abbreviated version of Winston Churchill’s famous and very apt words that ‘Never was so much owed by so many to so few’.

If you are interested in finding out more about the panel I’ve written about different aspects of it in various publications (as well as this blog), most recently in Reading the thread edited by Lesley Millar and Alice Kettle, published by Bloomsbury. I’ve also written about its production and my commission to produce a contemporary response to it in Textile: cloth and culture 18(1) 24-38 which you can access for free via the link below https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/4FNFA2Z8U8DBTUWKP4ZK/full?target=10.1080/14759756.2019.1646497