Teneriffe lace from Weldon’s Practical Needlework

 

Weldon’s Practical Needlework series cover all types of lace making as well as needlework, and one magazine in volume 17 focuses on Teneriffe lace. The magazines are undated but I think this one was published in the early part of the twentieth century. I have never tried making this style of lace but the introduction in the magazine reports that it is the latest fashion in fancy work and ‘consists in the making of little lace wheels’. The advantages of Teneriffe lace include that it is ‘easy, portable and inexpensive’ and that the wheels ‘can be applied to a variety of purposes’.

To make the lace you need a base on which to form the initial circle of threads, enough pins to keep them in place and some crochet cotton. It is ideal if the base circle of threads is made with one continuous thread, with a little left over to start the weaving process. To begin the work, the weaving thread is passed alternately over and under two of the foundation threads, drawing the thread down into the centre of the circle as you can see in Fig 2 above. Once you have made a complete circle you reverse the direction and work another circle in the opposite direction, and then work a third circle to make a compact and firm centre. The circle can then be embellished in various ways by catching clusters of threads to make different patterns as you can see in Fig 3.

When the weaving is finished the pins holding the foundation threads at the edges are removed to release the completed wheel. If the last round of knotting is close to the pins holding the foundation threads, the removal of the pins leaves an edge of picots, which can be used to attach the wheels to each other or to a linen background with buttonhole stitches.

To make a larger piece of lace you can join more wheels to each other and fill in the gaps between them with small squares or rounds of the lace. The magazine suggests making these smaller shapes on a Briggs No 2 lace wheel, which seems to be part of a set of Teneriffe wheel frames, which can be bought in brass or tortoise-shell. In the image the wheels and squares all seem to fit together beautifully but I can imagine it would be quite hard in practice to get them to fit neatly together. The magazine recommends not drawing up the stitches tightly but leaving ‘a certain amount of elasticity’. I can see that Teneriffe lace is portable and inexpensive, as the magazine suggests, and would have been ideal for a busy woman who wanted a project that could be picked up and worked in odd moments, as well as taken to a tea party to work while seeing friends, but I think all the sewing required to join the wheels together at the end would have been quite tricky.