Guipure d’Art

I looked up guipure lace in an encyclopaedia from 1882 this week and was surprised to find that the entry covered 16 pages and dealt with a range of laces I wasn’t expecting, which just shows how lace terms vary over the years. I thought I would focus on the entry for guipure d’art which seemed to me very like what we call filet lace today. Like filet work this lace begins with the formation of a net base which is secured on a wire frame, ensuring that the net is held taught and the squares are drawn out to their full extent. The net is then embellished using various embroidery stitches to form the pattern. Simple darning is used to fill individual squares or to form a line of solid work as can be seen on the right in the image above. Other stitches such as point d’esprit (interlinked and reversed blanket stitches) or point tiellage (an open twisted cross stitch) can be used to form a lighter filling stitch. Solid leaves, triangles and circles can also be worked by close weaving over thread outlines.

This work was obviously popular for the amateur lacemaker in the 1880 as the instructions assume a level of competence. However patterns for this type of work are also found in Federico Vinciolo’s book of Renaissance patterns for lace and embroidery published in 1587, which as you can see in the image, clearly show the variety of stitches to be worked. This type of lace has therefore been made for centuries although given different names at different times.