Lace songs and tells

 Researchers in Vienna have recently found that groups of people singing together can improve team work and interpersonal coordination. This would not have been news to Victorian lacemakers in the East Midlands area of England who encouraged the children in lace schools to sing as they worked at their pillows.

These songs, known as lace tells, improved concentration and were often linked to counting the number of pins worked in a lace pattern in a specific period of time. One Bedfordshire counting tell goes as follows:

Needle pin, needle pin, stitch upon stitch,

Work the old lady out of the ditch,

If she is not out as soon as I,

A rap on the knuckles shall come by and by,

A horse to carry my lady about –

Must not look off till 20 are out.

The children then worked 20 pins and if any of them spoke or looked away from their pillow before they had completed 20 pins the others would call out:

Hang her up for half an hour,

Cut her down like a flower.

The girl referred to would then place another pin and reply:

I won’t be hung for half an hour,

I won’t be cut down like a flower.

Other lace tells were related to local people and events. Many local lacemakers were unhappy with the treatment they received from the Buckingham lace buyer Mr E Godfroy who often paid them in tokens, which could only be used to buy food in certain shops, rather than money that could be spent anywhere. In revenge they sang this lace tell about him:

Nineteen miles to Charing Cross,

To see a Black Man ride on a white horse.

The rogue was so saucy he wouldn’t come down,

To show me the road to the nearest town.

I picked up a turmut and cracked his old crown

And made him cry ‘turmuts’ all over town.

Godfroy was known as the Black Man because he was the first lace buyer to get the lacemakers using black silk thread to make lace. Obviously many lacemakers would have liked to pick up a turnip (a solid root vegetable known locally as a turmut) and hit him over the head with it to ‘crack his old crown’. These are just two examples of lace tells collected by Thomas Wright in his history of lacemaking, based on his research at the beginning of the twentieth century. Others deal with a variety of subjects including romance, death, gruesome murders and each other’s appearance, which must have made for a lively school day.

A painted lace tablecloth

 

Over the Easter holiday I was lucky enough to visit Worcester City Art Gallery and Museum where I saw an exhibition of some beautiful portraits painted by John Singer Sargent. He was part of the Broadway colony of artists painting in Worcestershire at the end of the nineteenth and the early part of the twentieth centuries. The exhibition also featured some works by the other artist in the group including ‘Between two fires’ painted by Francis Davis Millet in 1892.

It wasn’t the subject of the painting that attracted me. In fact I felt a bit sorry for the puritan man in the picture who looks rather intimidated by the two maids on either side of him. It caught my eye because of the accurate depiction of the lacework round the tablecloth, which you can see in close up in the photo at the top of this post. It is in fact drawn work where threads are pulled, or drawn, out of the background cloth and the remaining threads are used as a background for embroidery stitches. The horizontal and vertical threads you can see were originally part of the cloth and the diagonal ones were added as embroidery stitches with a needle and thread. The raw edges of the rectangular shapes would have been secured with closely worked buttonhole stitches like the edges in the image below.

However this embroidery, although it looks like the lace in the painting, is not drawn work because the threads used to make the pattern across the open space are thicker than the cloth threads and have been added afterwards as free embroidery.

I was also interested in the caps on the maids’ heads especially as I had been looking at speldenmuts a few weeks before. The ones in the painting are much smaller than the caps from the Netherlands and beautifully painted so you can see the gathers and the spots on the muslin. However I wasn’t sure that embroidered muslin would have been use for servants headwear in the seventeenth century, which is the time that the painting is set. I’m also dubious about the net curtain at the window. I’ve seen several paintings and photographs of similar half curtains at the windows of cottages in the nineteenth century but not in the seventeenth. Who would have thought that a casual visit to an art exhibition would have thrown up so many textile questions!

Religious lace bobbins

 

I was trying to find some inscribed lace bobbins relevant to the Easter period to blog about this week, but I haven’t managed to find any. T S Huetson in his survey of bobbins in the early part of the twentieth century reports finding lace bobbins inscribed with the words ‘Easter’ as well as ‘Christ crucified’ and ‘Jesus died for me’. The closest I could find were the general religious inscriptions in the image above, reading from left to right ‘I love Jesus yes I do I do’, ‘Thou O God seest me’ and ‘Jesus’. Many lacemakers followed a nonconformist Christian faith, which meant they believed they had a personal relationship with God and their services involved hymn singing and personal reflection. They would have attended newly built chapels rather than the local village church and the children would have attended Sunday school where they learnt stories from the Bible and their significance to contemporary life. Sunday was the Lord’s day and therefore a day of rest when no work was done. Lace pillows were covered over on Saturday evening and not uncovered again until Monday morning when lacemaking recommenced. Religion would have played an important part in the lives of most lacemakers so it is surprising that so few religious bobbins survive. Perhaps it is more of a reflection on the types of lace bobbins subsequent generations have decided to keep and the cheeky ones like ‘Kiss me quick’ or those with names on have proved more popular with collectors and lacemakers.

Speldenmuts - pin caps from The Netherlands

 

I saw this pin cap at Luton Museum (Wardown House Gallery and Museum) and was fascinated by the row of tiny pins around the lace. I was interested to know whether they were just there for decoration or had a practical use. I’ve since been doing some research and found that these caps are part of the regional costume from the south west region of Brabant in the Netherlands.

                                

The caps have a large crown, gathered on to a strip of lace or fabric, attached to linen ties to secure the cap. These ties would have been pulled tight and tied in a bow at the nape of the neck to keep the crown in place so that it would have kept the wearer’s hair off her face and neatly covered. In most of the caps I have seen the crown area is finely embroidered although whether this was common or only the highly decorated ones have survived I don’t know.

                           

The front part of the cap is made up of a border with a wide scallop sewn from fine lawn edged with lace or entirely of lace. It is attached to the strip of fabric that holds the crown with fine pleats. In many examples the lace seems to be of the Lille type with a wide area of open net with occasional tallies and a floral border along the edge outlined with a thicker gimp thread.

The defining feature of all the caps is the row of pins fixed closely together to make a band of shining silver down the centre of the lappet. Some sources say the pins are copper others say they are stainless steel but so far I have only seen the silver-coloured steel ones. The examples I’ve found in museums all date from the nineteenth century, however some are from the early part and others from the end of the century, reinforcing the theory that these caps were items of regional dress that were kept and reused possibly by different generations, rather than fashion wear that changes over time. As for my original question about the pins, all the sources I’ve seen suggest the pins were decorative and were added to give sparkle to the caps and had no functional use at all.

Modern lace fashions inspired by Marie Antoinette

 

Last week we looked at some of the eighteenth century lace from the Marie Antoinette exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, but this week we’ll see some examples from the exhibition of how modern fashion designers have been inspired by her style to use lace in their creations. Some of these gowns were made for actresses portraying her in films and others were designed for the catwalk.

The Christian Dior gown at the top of this post was made for the actor Emilia Schule who played the title role in Banijay’s series Marie Antoinette in 2023. The image here shows details of the silk layers trimmed with machine-made lace.

This wedding dress was designed by the Vivienne Westwood fashion house in 2025. It includes a paniered skirt and train made of machine-made, Chantilly-style lace, combined with a stiff, lace-covered bodice, none of which would have looked out of place in eighteenth century France. However, where a period gown would have a full skirt, this one instead has a gathered mini skirt revealing the model’s legs. It also features a lovely veil made of fine net, edged with the same lace as the gown.

This gown, designed by Alessandro Michele for Valentino in 2025, also has a paniered silhouette and train and incorporates layers of floral lace. It was inspired by Marie Antoinette’s private hideaway, the Petit Trianon, and reflects the idea of an idealised countryside lifestyle with shepherdesses in the fields.

This older design inspired by Marie Antoinette was made in about 1923 by the Boué Soeurs. They were known for their ‘lingerie dresses’ and their advertisements featured models as shepherdesses. These references to the Petit Trianon, relaxation and idyllic countryside reflect the life of Marie Antoinette and the scandal she caused when she was painted in a simple muslin dress, which the public considered to be nothing more than underwear. This lingerie dress features paniers under a lace and silk chiffon skirt, embellished with dainty ribbon roses reflecting the bucolic theme and the fashion house, which incorporated a rose on its labels.

These dresses aren’t actual lace, but I couldn’t resist including them. The one thing everyone thinks they know about Marie Antoinette is that she uncaringly said ‘Let them eat cake’ when she heard that French peasants were starving. However there is no evidence she said anything of the sort and the story did not appear until 50 years after her death, so it does seem unlikely. However, these silicone dresses designed by Jeremy Scott for Moschino in 2020-2021 are lace-like and great fun and reflect the fantasy and excess of what has become known as the Marie Antoinette style.

Lace in the V&A Marie Antoinette exhibition

 

Although several of the artefacts in this exhibition at the V&A Museum in London once belonged to Marie Antoinette, such as the chemise she wore in prison before her execution, her prayer book, a shoe, and items from her dressing table, none of the lace on display can be attributed to her. However, the examples are typical of the time and are similar to lace she would have worn. The image shows a detail of a beautiful silk embroidered robe from about 1780 embellished with white silk bobbin lace and net.

The first garment on display in the exhibition is a beautiful silver brocade, silk gown and train worn in 1774 by Marie Antoinette’s sister in law, a future Queen of Sweden. It is thought to be a copy of the dress 14-year-old Marie Antoinette wore on her wedding day in 1770 to the 15-year-old Louis-Auguste, Dauphin of France, the future king Louis XVI.

Paintings of the wedding show Marie Antoinette sparkling in this formal court dress, known as a robe de cour. The extensive train is edged with silver bobbin lace which is attached from the bodice and round the circumference of the train. Silver lace is made from a core of thread wrapped in silver so is quite stiff and does not gather well. Applying it to the fabric in this way allows it to catch the light and shimmer. It would have looked spectacular in candlelight.

This bodice stiffened with whalebone is similar to ones Marie Antoinette would have worn at the French court. These bodices were very uncomfortable and her mother, the Austrian empress Maria Theresa, writing in one of her numerous letters to her daughter offers to send her a more comfortable one from Vienna. This bodice dates from about 1760 and is embellished with rows of silver bobbin lace in a scalloped design.

Lighter more delicate lace at this time was mainly needle made and the exhibition includes these fine Alençon lace borders dating from 1780-1820. This type of lace would have been used to edge sleeves and frills.

These two pieces of lace are lappets, which were lengths of lace that hung down either side of a cap. Some hung over the ears, others down the back and lappets could also be pinned up on the top of the head. I have not seen any paintings of Marie Antoinette wearing lappets, although her hair is always ornately dressed and she often wears hats, feathers, and jewels on her head. Perhaps lappets were out of fashion by this time or were a fashion for older women. The lower lappet in the image is Alençon lace but the upper one is from Argentan. These two towns were both famous for their fine needle lace and the styles were similar. The main difference is in the ground stitches that form the net. The  Alençon mesh is made up of fine blanket stitches with an extra twist giving a square appearance, while for the Argentan mesh each side of the net is overstitched in blanket stitch making a more solid hexagonal mesh. These are the types of lace that Marie Antoinette would have been familiar with and would have worn. The exhibition also includes more modern examples of lace that fashion designers have used in garments inspired by the Marie Antoinette style but we’ll look at those another day.

Lace making pins

 

Pins are an essential part of bobbin lace making as they are the temporary structures around which the threads are worked to make the lace. They come in many different lengths, widths and metals to suit the type of lace being made. Pins were originally made in two parts: the long pointed shaft and the head. The first types of head were made of wire twisted into a sphere and then attached to the shaft by compression. Later, solid heads were made with a small hole at the base into which the shaft was pushed and kept in place by the tightness of the fit. As you can imagine the heads often came off these pins and the lacemakers improvised to replace them with blobs of sealing wax or seed heads. Pins with permanently attached heads were not made commercially in England until the mid 1830s.

The image at the top shows modern stainless steel pins in the background with some interesting antique pins in the foreground. These pins were made using two brass pins joined together. You can see from the picture of the individual pin that the heads of the two pins were joined, then some small coloured beads were threaded on to the top pin and the end sealed off. Thomas Wright, in his history of East Midlands English lace areas, says this was done by using the head from another pin, so that one pin was wasted to make one of these longer pins. This seems unlikely to me as pins would have been precious and few lacemakers would have wanted to waste one. Also the close up shows a pin with a blob of sealing wax at the top to stop the beads falling off. Of course the sealing wax could have been used over the head of another pin, but I would have thought that if the sealing wax did the job that is what the lacemakers would have used. Of the four pins in the main image three seem to have sealing wax heads and one has a pin head. These long, decorated pins were known as limicks or bugles in Buckinghamshire, as King pins in Bedfordshire and as strivers throughout the lacemaking area.

Wright suggests that limicks were used to decorate the lace pillow, but strivers were used to measure the amount of lace produced in a given time. The striver pin was either used in the footside of the lace pattern at the start of the period or pinned beside the lace on the pillow. It was then possible to measure from the striver pin to the end of the lace to see how much lace had been made in a period of time. Striver pins were used in the lace schools to encourage the children to work harder and compete with each other to produce the most lace in a given time. Lacemakers today still use decorative pins, both as strivers and to beautify our lace pillows, like this lovely set of rose pins I bought in the Misuyabari needle shop in Kyoto, Japan.