Lace curtain design

I’ve been looking at lace curtain designing again this week, in particular floral designs and how they were used in border patterns. The curtains in the image are from the Peach and Sons catalogue from 1904 and many of them have floral borders. Some are very stylised while others are quite naturalistic and flowing. Books of the time that taught design to students were insistent on drawing from nature as well as from memory and then developing those images into designs. In fact Owen Jones who wrote the Grammar of Ornament (the mainstay of teaching and good taste at the time) considered nature the best designer of all.