I bought this pair of dainty lace curtains at a busy market
and wasn’t sure at the time whether they were machine or hand made lace. Clearly
the curtains themselves were hand made as they were small café curtain, with small
hand-stitched brass rings at the top and seemed to have been cut down from a larger
piece of lace. At first glance I thought they were made of machine lace because
of the repetitive patterns, the solid cloth stitch and the amount of detail involved
in the motifs. However on closer inspection I was delighted to find that the
lace motifs had been needle run on to the net by hand in a technique similar to
Limerick lace.
I noticed that each motif was slightly different to the
others, in particular the fillings of the main flowers and leaves and in some
cases the fillings had been worked at different angles.
Also the threads of the embroidery went through the net in
different ways and looped round the net in a way that would have been
impossible for a machine. I’m now wondering who the original lace was made by
and what it was used for before it became a pair of small lace curtains.
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