Plauen lace collars

 

These lovely lace collars are advertised in a 1904 catalogue from the Peach lace company and are both labelled as Plauen lace, a town in Saxony known for its embroidered lace. The lace was embroidered in a type of lock stitch, using a Schiffli embroidery machine, onto a net background or other backing material which was then removed leaving only the stitched lace behind. Between 1881 and 1905 various patents were taken out describing types of backing fabrics and methods for removing them. In Britain the general term for lace produced in this way was chemical lace and most was imported from Switzerland and Saxony.

The lace was popular at the end of the nineteenth and into the twentieth century. It produced a good imitation of handmade lace and was reasonably priced for middle-class customers. The collar at the top was 8.5 inches deep and cost 3/9 while the lower collar was 7.75 inches deep and cost 2/9. It was also hard wearing and easy to launder so would have been easy to keep clean, and was therefore a practical as well as a beautiful lace.

Nottingham lace curtains

 

I’m delighted that my article on ‘Early twentieth century Nottingham lace curtains: an ideal window furnishing’ has just been published online by Textile History. It started with some research into three collections of machine lace curtains from the archive of Nottingham City Museums and Galleries and I used them as the basis for further research into the types of curtains that were for sale in the early twentieth century, both in the UK market and for export. I also looked at sales catalogues, retail advertising and advice manuals to see how different curtains were promoted to different social groups. This was done by suggesting certain curtains for different rooms in the house and for different budgets. The years after the first world war brought great cultural changes to life and homes in many countries and these were reflected in curtain designs and sales. The paper also includes information on the workings of the Nottingham lace curtain machine and the training of lace curtain designers. As you can see, the article covers many aspects of the lace curtain trade as well as some social history so I hope you will find it interesting. If you are interested in reading it, the publishers have kindly provided 50 free copies on a first come first served basis via this link https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/UGGP82D3BMHQFZBMGTHS/full?target=10.1080/00404969.2024.2318661

 

 

Lace songs and chants

 

Singing songs, or chanting, while making lace seems to have been a common occurrence and Shakespeare even refers to it in Twelfth Night. It was particularly encouraged in the lace schools of the English East Midlands where songs were sung to keep the children focused on their work and encourage them to work more quickly. Many of the songs, or tells, are linked to counting rhymes, so the children could count the number of pins they put up in a certain time or count the number of pins they had worked along the edge, or footside, of the work. Thomas Wright recounts how charming it was to hear 30 or so children singing while they worked at their pillows. As well as encouraging a good work rate the lacemakers also reported that singing cheered them up in dull weather and some tells are designed to keep the children alert, rather than acting as counting aids, for example, in one tell, each child calls out the name of someone in their village until everyone has been named. Interestingly, John Yallop has found no record of lacemakers singing lace tells in Honiton or elsewhere in Devon. This may be because of the different types of lace made in the two areas. In Devon separate motifs are made while in the East Midlands the lace is generally made in continuous strips which lends itself to counting rows and pins more easily. Many of the tells involved repetitive and complicated stories of lacemakers and their lives and different counties also had different styles of tell. Those in Bedfordshire and Northampton tended to be romantic tales while the tells of Buckinghamshire often involved gruesome murders with appropriate cries and dramatic effects designed to keep the children alert.

Attitudes to bobbin lacemaking in the nineteenth century

 

I spent an interesting day at Luton Museum last week researching the decline and revival of the handmade lace industry in the nineteenth century. I was interested to read about Catherine Channer’s interviews with lacemakers at the end of that century and the differing attitudes they had to making Bucks point lace. She found that the older women, aged over seventy, had fond memories of making lace. Many of them told her how they loved making lace and would happily sit all day at their pillows. They told her it was nice, clean work and reasonably paid. One old lady told her she loved her pillow and said “When I was a girl I spent all my pocket money on my pillow; I loved to have it nice. I had some beautiful bobbins, bone ones with beads on them and names, and my pins had different coloured heads”. However talking to middle-aged women Miss Channer got a completely different response. Many of them said they hated lacemaking because it was badly paid and they wouldn’t want their children to do it. One reported that she hated it so much she burned all her bobbins. Another said “It’s an awful trade lacemaking” which is confirmed by another woman saying “If you go lacemaking you’ll never have salt to your porridge”. Why was there such a difference in attitudes? Mainly because the older women had been working at a time when handmade lace was valued and the patterns had been beautiful to work. The middle-aged ones only remembered an industry in decline, when they had poor patterns and thread and had to work hours under pressure for little reward. Today we are fortunate that lacemaking is a leisure or artistic activity, and we are not working with cheap materials under time pressure for a few pence, so like the older lacemakers we can enjoy our pillows and lacemaking.

‘Modern’ point lace

 

My 1882 edition of the Dictionary of needlework describes how to work this type of needlelace which was a popular pastime in the late nineteenth century. It describes point lace as any needlelace, except cut and drawn work, which is worked in buttonhole stitches on a parchment pattern. It goes on to explain that this modern type of point lace has been made since 1855, particularly in France where it is known as dentelle renaissance. The materials required are tracing cloth on which to draw the design, Toile Cire (which seems to be oil cloth) ‘to give firmness to the lace while in progress’ so I assume it is used as a backing cloth for the work, needles, linen braids and linen thread. A variety of linen braids were obviously available at the time but the book notes you could also make your own in bobbin lace if you preferred. It recommends using a fine thread such as Haythorne’s linen thread (I assume this is a brand name).

The first step is to draw the outline of the lace onto the tracing cloth and this is the suggested starting pattern. Then tack the braid loosely to the cloth. After that overcast all the edges of the braid, drawing up the thread at the inner edges of the curves so they sit flat. Then join the separate parts of the design with bars as shown by passing a thread across a space three times, buttonholing over the threads to the centre of the bar, where a picot is formed, and then continuing by buttonholing the other half of the bar. The centre of the braid shapes can then be filled with needlelace filling stitches. For beginners they suggest using point de Bruxelles as the filling stitch, which is a series of interlocked rows of loose buttonhole stitches. This seems quite a difficult stitch for beginners, as it is hard to maintain a good tension, but of course Victorian women all knew how to stitch and most were quite adept at something as well-known as buttonhole stitch.

A series of draughts for the Nottingham lace curtain machine

 

This set of four lace machine draughts are all variations on a theme of roses. They all have the same heading and a similar pattern along the base, while the main parts of the design are all variations on a series of roses, four-petalled flowers and leaves. I have previously seen a variety of designs produced this way and thought they were variations produced by the designer for the manufacturer to choose which one they preferred. I didn’t realise that manufacturers produced a variety of fairly similar designs for sale and therefore the designers were probably producing a suite of designs that complemented each other to make a range for that season.

These draughts were painted by hand by a draughtsman based on the designers original drawing. They are basically instructions converting the design into a pattern that can be made on the Nottingham lace curtain machine. Each draught contains the information for one pattern repeat and the places where the repeat begins and ends are marked. The red and green rectangles indicate different operations for the lace machine – generally red indicates back spool ties and green means Swiss ties. The draughts also provide other information such as the fineness or point size of the lace, its width and depth and whether the edging is overlocked or a picot edging. Following this stage, the draughts would have been sent to the card puncher who would have converted the information into a set of punched Jacquard cards which would have been ‘read’ by the machine to make the lace. A stamp on the draughts says ‘Lace textile designers draughtsmen 40 Upper Parliament Street, Nottingham’ which suggests that the people making these draughts were a specialist company of designer draughtsmen and not part of a larger manufacturing company, as was often the case. They probably produced a range of designs for several lace manufacturers.

Lacemaking at the Great Exhibition 1851

Bucks point lace made from this draught won a gold medal at the Great Exhibition in 1851. According to Thomas Wright, Miss Elizabeth Clayson from Olney demonstrated lacemaking at the exhibition and was working on this pattern when Queen Victoria visited the show. The Queen asked the usual question ‘Are the different coloured bobbins a guide to which thread you turn over?’ and was told this was not the case. Whether she highlighted its similarity to tatting is not recorded! (These are the two observations everyone makes at lace demonstrations!)

The pattern was designed by John Millward from Olney, a well-known Buckinghamshire lace-making town, for the lace manufacturers Messrs. Copestake and Co. The Jury report of the exhibition suggests that the medal was awarded to the company, not the designer or lacemaker, and was for their complete range including Bucks point, Honiton and tambour lace as well as embroidered muslin. Particular mention is made of ‘very wide Buckinghamshire lace of fine quality’ which presumably refers to this pattern. The lace was made in three widths and we are not told which one Miss Clayson was working on when she met the Queen, I do hope it was a smaller, more manageable, version and not the very wide one.