Handmade or machine-made lace?

 

The first question most people ask about a piece of lace is ‘Is it made by hand or machine?’ With most types of lace it is fairly easy to tell, but with Chantilly lace it is always difficult to decide because the machine-made versions were such clever copies. This type of bobbin lace was first made in the northern French town of Chantilly in about 1840 and was popular for shawls, lappets, parasols and flounces until the end of the 19th century. It is a very fine lace that is time-consuming to make, so separate strips of the lace were made by different workers and then sewn together using an almost invisible stitch called point de raccroc. This forms a weak point in the lace and sometimes this stitching unravels revealing the join between the sections. Finding these gaps indicates that the lace was handmade because machine-made pieces do not have these joins.

Another way to decide if the lace is handmade is to follow some of the thread paths. In handmade lace you can follow the threads from one section of the work to another, for example in this piece the threads form a continuous line from the floral shapes into the ground net. In handmade lace the thicker outlining gimp threads are also incorporated into the stitches on the edges of the floral design elements. The threads that make up the picots along the edge of the lace should also come from the body of the lace rather than being a separate addition and form loops rather than just thread ends. Handmade lace often feels softer than machine-made lace, which can feel hard to the touch and may drape less well.

People generally value handmade over machine-made lace, probably because they understand the skill that would be required to make the lace and realise how difficult it would be. However we should not dismiss the skill of those who produced machines to make lace and the designers, draughtsmen and twist hands who made the machine lace. We tend to think that machine-made things are worth less because they are plentiful and cheap. However, machine-made lace allowed more people to own and wear beautiful lace at an affordable price.