Lace and poetry

I was reading a book about the textile artist Gerhardt Knodel and was intrigued by the quotations in the book, including one of my favourites, T S Eliot’s Burnt Norton which begins ‘Time present and time past are both perhaps present in time future’. Much of Knodel’s work is ethereal even though it is often on a large scale and I will write more about him another day. I also like to reference poetry and literature in my work and the image shows part of a triptych I made inspired by W B Yeats’ He wishes for the cloths of heaven. It’s such a lovely poem and quite short so I’ll repeat it here: 

Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths

Enwrought with golden and silver light

The blue and the dim and the dark cloths

Of night and light and the half-light

I would spread the cloths under your feet

But I, being poor, have only my dreams

I have spread my dreams under your feet

Tread softly because you tread on my dreams

As you can guess the image is of the blue cloth of night. The lace is free bobbin lace and it's embedded in dyed silk paper fibres to give the impression of yearning for love and finding a space for dreaming.

‘Jack Alive’ inscribed lace bobbins

 

I was always led to believe that lace bobbins inscribed ‘Jack alive’, like the one in the image, were produced to celebrate the return of a sailor who everyone thought had been drowned at sea. The story was that a ship would be reported lost at sea and all on board would be presumed dead, then months later the young sailor would return to his village, everyone would be delighted and inscribe bobbins to celebrate his return. T L Huetson in his book Lace and bobbins says he has seen too many of these bobbins to justify the theory that they were made for this unusual occurrence. I agree with him. Surely if a young man who had been presumed dead returned to the village the bobbins would have included his name rather than use the generic term ‘Jack’ for a sailor. Huetson suggests that ‘Jack alive’ might have been a common Victorian expression whose meaning we have lost. Well, after some research online, and thanks to The Gale Review, I have discovered that ‘Jack’s Alive’ was a Victorian game, which is described in George Arnold’s 1858 book The sociable or one thousand and one home amusements. Everyone playing the game sits in a circle. A small stick is lit in the fire then blown out leaving sparks. The stick is passed from one person to another round the circle each one saying ‘Jack’s alive’ as he passes it on. The player holding the stick when the final spark dies has to have a moustache painted on their face with the charred stick or pay a forfeit instead. It sounds a lively game, and there are several lace bobbins inscribed with music hall catch phrases, so we know lacemakers enjoyed having popular sayings on their lace pillow, but whether this was the meaning of Jack alive we don’t know for sure.

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.  

Brise-bise lace curtains

 

These pretty brise-bise lace curtains come from a 1904 Peach & Sons catalogue. The Nottingham lace manufacturer produced regular catalogues advertising their lace products including curtains, tablecloths, bedspreads, and other household lace as well as lace clothing, collars and handkerchiefs. Brise-bise curtains were becoming popular at that time and were made to hang across the lower part of the window from a rod or wire. These ones have small brass rings on the top through which the rod can be slotted but others have a channel woven across the top of the curtain for the same purpose. Also advertised with the curtains are newly patented ‘bracketless’ rods for casement or brise-bise curtains. The advert emphasises that they require no cutting and no brackets are required for fixing; they are made of polished brass and come in a range of sizes. The curtains in the image are made in two sizes (26 x 34 or 34 x 36 inches, width x depth) and cost per pair 1/3 for the smaller size and 1/6 for the larger ones. Other, cheaper brise-bise curtains were made from continuous lengths of lace (generally 26 inches deep) and were sold by the yard. The name brise-bise comes from the French briser meaning to break and bise a light cold wind, which I like to think results in the curtains wafting gently in the breeze rather than being buffeted by a gale.

Teaching boys in lace schools

 In the early nineteenth century, many boys, as well as girls, in the villages of the English county of Buckinghamshire went to lace schools. This was not really a school as we know it – more like a sweat shop - as the children learnt very little apart from how to make bobbin lace, which was sold at the end of the month to the local lace dealer. The children had to attend for 10 to 12 hours every day except Sunday, and were allowed a half day off on Saturday. Their parents paid the teacher a fee ranging from 2 to 6 pennies a week, but all teachers charged more for boys because they were less clean, careful and obedient than the girls. According to Thomas Wright, who interviewed many Bucks lacemakers for his history of lacemaking, another disadvantage, from the teacher’s point of view, was that boys’ smocks were thicker than the girls’ clothes and also covered their necks and shoulders so smacking them as a punishment was less effective than it was with the girls. Many of the boys hated the lace school and there are reports of one throwing his lace pillow down a well, another throwing his into a duck pond and one running away to sea – which seems a very drastic solution! They generally left as soon as they could, to work in the fields. However, many men never forgot how to make lace and one lacemaker told Wright that when she was a small girl and went to bed too tired to finish her lace, her father would often return from work and make a few extra inches of lace on her lace pillow, for her to find in the morning. The second half of the nineteenth century saw the demise of lace schools. The Workshop Act of 1867 forbade the employment of children under 8 years and those aged 8-13 could only work half time. The Education Act of 1871 also brought in compulsory education for children, although lace making continued to be taught as part of the curriculum in lacemaking areas.   

Domestic trauma: textile responses to confinement, coercion and control

 

This is the title of a paper I wrote for a special issue of the journal Textile Cloth and Culture focusing on textiles and trauma. Textiles often bear witness to trauma. This may be as forensic evidence or as documents of record made by the traumatised or their loved ones, to ensure that traumatic events are not forgotten. In this paper I concentrate on domestic trauma in particular confinement, coercion and control in the home, all of which increased during the lockdowns resulting from the Covid-19 pandemic. Textiles can be an alternative form of discourse for those without access to mainstream media. One example I quote is Elizabeth Parker’s nineteenth-century cross-stitch sampler, now in the V&A Museum, recording her abuse by her employer. Other examples are the arpilleras made by women in Peru affected by domestic violence. I also reference contemporary work such as 35 I cant’s by Alison Lowry and Jayne Cherry and of course my own practice-based research using net curtains such as Whispering and Marking time. The paper does end on a encouraging note as it also discusses textile based initiatives that help victims of domestic abuse. If you are interested in reading more there are some free copies available from the publisher   https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/PDVXXRAZQHRGTKKTIEGS/full?target=10.1080/14759756.2021.2019370

Flowers in tape lace

 

This pretty lace edging is made from a combination of purchased machine-made lace tapes and crochet and was a very popular technique for home lacemakers in the early twentieth century. Many needlework magazines included patterns for this type of lace and a variety of lace tapes were made and sold for the purpose.

These tapes come from an illustration in Therese de Dillmont’s needlework encyclopaedia and show a few of the styles available. The tapes were tacked down onto the backing fabric following the pattern and joined either by needlelace or, as in this case, crochet work. Then when the pieces were all secured to each other the tacking thread was removed and the lace could be removed in one piece.

Both the pieces illustrated here were made using tapes made up of a series of joined leaf shapes. In the main image the tapes have been angled to form petals but in this piece the tapes have been used to form a circle enclosing a larger crochet design. Both are very pretty and were probably made by the same person (they were given to me by a friend and came from the same source). I particularly like the floral one with the little crochet frill overlapping the fabric.