Draught for a Nottingham lace curtain

 

This is a draught, or lace pattern, for a Nottingham curtain machine. It includes all the coded instructions that the card puncher required to punch the jacquard cards that instructed the machine. This draught would have been made by a draughtsman whose job was to convert the pattern produced by the designer into these coded instructions on graph paper. It is printed with the name Edwards and Richardson, and tells us that they were designers and draughtsmen in Nottingham. Many of the larger lace companies designed and draughted their own patterns but it seems that Edwards and Richardson specialised in designing and draughting for a range of companies and did not actually make any lace themselves. The squares on the draught are coded red, green and blue and these colours usually indicated back spool ties, Swiss ties and combination ties, respectively, although there was no fixed system and manufacturers chose their own colour code. 

As well as the coloured squares the draught also includes information on the quality of the lace, 12 point in this case which is a medium to fine lace. It also marks the pattern repeat with two extravagant capital letter Rs and tells us that the type of lace is filet and combination. This type of lace curtain, mimicking filet lace of an earlier century, has the appearance of a square grid with blocks of solid work forming the pattern and was popular in the late 1920s.