Making Nottingham lace curtains

 This lovely design was made using the Nottingham lace curtain machine which despite its name was used to make a range of lace furnishings, including tablecloths and bedspreads, and was not only used in Nottingham, as these machines were exported round the world.

The Nottingham lace curtain machine works in a different way to other lace machines. The warp threads remain vertical while the weft thread moves across from one warp to the next one. Each time it moves adjacent to a warp thread it is linked to the warp by a separate bobbin thread which twists, or pillars, around the warp and the weft threads thus joining them together. This produces the characteristic square mesh of curtain lace which you can see in the image above. You can also see that the mesh can be varied by using two different weft threads of different thicknesses or by altering the spacing between the movements of the weft threads leaving wider gaps between the pillaring.

Other decorative ground patterns can also be made by using combination effects, for example where two or more pillars (the warp and weft from the spool threads) are joined together by the bobbin thread to make larger holes.

From its invention in 1846, the lace curtain machine made use of the jacquard system for producing patterned lace and one machine was able to produce a pair of curtains 4 yards (3.6 m) long in 2 hours. By 1851 there were about 100 curtain machines making lace in the Nottingham area and some beautiful lace curtains were displayed at the Great Exhibition in London in that year. The industry benefitted from the surge in house building at the time and the popularity of large windows which showed off the designs on the curtains to great advantage. It was not until the early twentieth century that the industry faced competition from the USA and fashions began to move away from ornate curtains to a simpler style.