Inscribed Honiton lace bobbins

 

In my blog of 19 June I looked at Honiton lace bobbins and explained why they are finer than East Midlands bobbins and don’t require spangles to weight them. Most Honiton bobbins are plain, but some are inscribed and decorated by incising their surface, in a similar way to scrimshaw, and then filing the incisions with coloured sealing wax. The bobbin on the right, in the image above, shows the typical triangular shaped incisions filled with red wax. The central area depicts a sailing ship with sails and rigging and a circle with simple markings possibly to represent the sun or a face. Round the top of the bobbin, three letters are inscribed, separated by triangles; these are presumably the initials of the owner or the giver. The inscription on the second bobbin is much more complex and more finely worked. It includes the initials SM at the top and the date 1817, but the name Elizabeth Matthews is inscribed in a spiral down the shank of the bobbin, which suggests that SM gave this bobbin to Elizabeth as a gift. Between the lines of the spiral are a ship, an anchor, a bird and a diamond shape, all linked with small patterns made up of tiny triangular shapes. This bobbin has also been coloured with both red and dark blue or black sealing wax. These bobbins are typical of inscribed Honiton bobbins in that they both include initials and ships, which were often so realistically drawn that the type of vessel can be identified. Other motifs used were animals, such as fish or birds, human figures and mermaids, stylised flowers, hearts and patterns of lines, bricks or triangles. If you are interested in finding out more, a good source of images is H J Yallop’s book The history of the Honiton lace industry, in which he includes several pages of these symbols.

Mary Bailey lace runner and poet

 

Mary Bailey was a lace runner in Nottingham in the early part of the nineteenth century, which meant she embroidered lace designs onto machine-made net. It was a skilled job requiring artistic talent, good eyesight and neat, accurate work and was essential to the Nottingham lace trade because, at that time, lace machines could not produce patterned lace, only net ground. Mary was one of many poorly paid lace workers whose lives generally went unremarked. But Mary was different, because in 1826 she published a pamphlet of 13 poems to raise money to help her to support her young children and sickly husband. These poems are not the anodyne verses expected from a working-class woman who knows her place. Instead they reflect her life and work, her hopes and fears and the struggle to give her family a decent life. One reflects on the hard work required to make lace and why it should be fairly remunerated. Here are the first two verses:

You ladies of Britain, we most humbly address/And hope you will take it in hand/And at once condescend on poor runners to think/When dress’d at your glasses you stand

How little you think of that lily-white veil/That shields you from gazers and sun/ How hard have we work’d, and our eyes how we’ve strain’d/When those beautiful flowers we run.

Another poem thanks the lady who came to her house with bread one evening when she had nothing to feed her children. One poem shames another lady who ‘desired me to pray for the death of my youngest child’ because she considered Mary had too many children. Another reports how Mary challenged two middle-class girls she saw tormenting a locust and highlights the morality of the story. Other poems record events in her life and people she knew. Mary died in 1828, two years after the poems were published, leaving her husband and nine children below the age of thirteen. I do hope they survived and prospered after all her efforts to look after them. What an amazing woman.

My information about Mary Bailey came from a booklet published by Five Leaves Bookshop in Nottingham in which her poems are reprinted and introduced by John Goodridge.

So called ‘Bohemian’ lace from 1911

 

While researching early twentieth century lace recently I came across a series of advertisements for ‘Bohemian’ lace in the American publication Lace and Embroidery Review. This magazine was aimed at the trade buyer and informs them that a new lace line for Spring will be ‘Bohemian’ lace, which it claims is already very popular in Paris, particularly in champagne and ecru colours. Now, I appreciate that Bohemia is a well-known lace producing area, famous for both its traditional and contemporary lace, but the ‘Bohemian’ lace depicted in the magazine article is described as a tape lace made up of ‘two and sometimes three widths of linen tape twisted in arabesque form and very lightly bound together by brides’. It continues by suggesting that the designs resemble Moorish architecture and are also reminiscent of vermicelli patterns made from soutache braids. The dictionary tells me that soutache is a narrow, flat, ornamental braid used to trim garments and therefore is indeed very similar to the tapes used in tape lace.

The advertorial tells us that these ‘Bohemian’ laces come in both handmade and machine made varieties. Tape lace was popular at this time and many women’s magazines included patterns to be made up at home. It was also easy to buy a variety of different braids and threads from haberdashery shops. However the laces in the images are all machine made varieties sold by the dealers Case and Co. I don’t think it is surprising that the manufacturers have repurposed the name Bohemian for their lace. Machine laces were often given the names of handmade varieties of lace, for example, Valenciennes and Chantilly, to describe the style of the lace. I think the price would have soon made it clear whether the lace in question was hand or machine made.

Using filet lace insertions in the home

 

This filet lace insertion is Italian and was worked in the seventeenth century. It appears on the cover of an early twentieth century edition of Needlecraft magazine (annoyingly none of these magazines are dated). The magazine includes several filet lace patterns and includes suggestions for using them to decorate clothing and household linen. It notes that this design ‘would make a fine flounce for a duchesse table cloth or for the edge of a towel’. It also recommends that this type of border should be combined with fine drawn-thread work.

These filet squares have been inserted in linen and although the piece does not include any drawn-thread work, four different cut-work designs have been used to break up the solid, woven areas. Strangely, the magazine says that if an insertion like this is added to plain linen it looks over-elaborate, but if it is combined with satin-stitch embroidery, broderie anglais or Hedebo work the ‘fineness of the border is justified and its beauty enhanced’. It seems odd to specify these three types of embroidery – what about cut-work, for example, does that enhance the beauty or not? Also you would think that adding all these different types of needlework would result in over-elaboration rather than the reverse! However, I do think the addition of cut-work in the image above enhances the piece, so perhaps the author is right after all.

Textiles along the Silk Road at the British Museum

 

I recently visited the new exhibition at the British Museum entitled Silk Roads and was interested to see examples of ancient silk as well as wool and cotton. The exhibition emphasises the role of the Silk Road in the exchange of ideas and goods between east and west and, certainly as far as the textiles go, concentrates on the period between 600 and 900 AD. The main image shows an embroidery of the Buddha emerging from a mountain, worked in silk thread on a silk ground. It was found in the Mogao Caves in Dunhuang, China which was a major Buddhist complex.

The dyed silk fragments in this image were patterned with a resist technique which uses wooden clamps to cover parts of the material before it is put into the dye bath. The pattern of geese and flowers in roundels was used in Central and West Asia before it spread to China. The British Museum and Chinese experts have managed to reconstruct this dying technique as well as a weaving technique used to produce a silk textile known a samite. The example in the exhibition is a sutra or cover for scrolls with a pattern of two lions facing each other; another pattern that originated in Central Asia. Both the dyed silk and the sutra were also found in the Mogao Caves.

The exhibition also recounts the legend of the princess who travelled from the East to marry the king of Khotan, bringing with her the secret of silk production, by hiding silk worm cocoons and mulberry seeds in her headdress. The panel shows her in the centre with a woman weaving silk and using a comb beater like the one in the cabinet on the right.

As well as luxury silks the exhibition also features another more utilitarian textile of the Silk Road; wool. This shoe is made of felted wool with leather patches. It was found in the guard station of a hill fort and would have had a drawstring tied round the ankle to keep it in place.

Cotton also features in the exhibition in the form of this funerary banner of a high ranking Uyghur man. The history of the nomadic Uyghurs provides an example of the movements of populations along the Silk Road. Originating from the Mongolian Plateau they established an empire which lasted for 100 years. Following its collapse, some of the population moved south west and by 866 AD they had gained control of Gaochang in China, where they established the Kocho kingdom. The inscription on this banner is in the Turkic language of Kocho.

The exhibition also has examples of what may be Sogdian silk and fragments of woven silk found in Egypt and traded in the Byzantine empire. I enjoyed the exhibition but would have liked to have seen more textiles, however, I expect this is a reflection of the small numbers of textiles that survive from that time. There are some other beautiful artefacts, particularly jewellery, metal work and books and the exhibition runs until 23 February 2025 if you are interested in seeing it for yourself.

Subversive doily tape lace

 

This is a close up of the outer edge of the latest doily in my subversive doily series. I like working this Eastern-European style lace as it only requires a few pairs of bobbins at any one time. Most of it is a simple half stitch braid that forms a trail around the mat. The downside is that every time the trail connects with a previous section of the lace you have to join the worker pair to the previous work by making a sewing. I was taught how to make sewings when I learnt Honiton lace, which also requires them, but was never very good at them. However, I am improving with all the practice I’m getting! Also, this thread is quite coarse so the pin holes are fairly large and I can use a fine crochet hook rather than a pin to pull the loops through, which makes it all easier. Another interesting aspect to this lace is the placing of the pin holes. I designed the pattern myself, including where I thought the pin holes should be placed for the half stitch trail to flow nicely, but I find that as I actually work the pattern I’m having to change some of them. In some cases I need an extra pin hole to keep the half stitch level otherwise the angle becomes too steep and the trail looks as if it’s been pulled out of shape. In others I need more (or fewer pin holes) to negotiate a loop in the pattern more successfully. It has made me appreciate the skill of those lace designers who can produce a lace pattern that works efficiently every time. I’m making mine work by adapting as I go along, so I just have to console myself by thinking that mine will be unique, even though it is not ideal.

Early twentieth century lace scarves

 

These lace scarves were all advertised in the 1904 catalogue produced by Samuel Peach, a well-known lace manufacturing company based in Nottingham. They are interesting because despite being machine made they all copy different styles of handmade lace. The black lace scarf in the top image is an imitation of a fine Chantilly-style lace, popular at the time, especially for evening and mourning wear. The scarf is 82 inches long (slightly over 2 metres) and 11 inches wide (28 cm) and cost 8 shillings and 6 pence.

The second scarf ends in a very bold pattern, similar to crochet lace, although it is actually chemical lace. This is made by machine embroidering onto a sacrificial background, which is removed by chemical or heat treatment, leaving the embroidered lace behind. This scarf is narrower and shorter than the black one (63 x 6 inches; 160 x 15 cm) and costs 3 shillings and 6 pence.

This scarf imitates fine point lace, such as Buckinghamshire lace, and incorporates several motifs that are common in the handmade version of this lace. This one is much cheaper than the previous two scarves and only costs 9 pence. This seems quite a bargain as it is 52 x 4 inches (132 x 10 cm) in size.

The final scarf is also machine embroidered but this time the embroidery is worked directly on the net background. This technique imitates handmade tambour lace, which is made with a fine hook that the lacemaker uses to work a type of chain stitch through the holes in the net. This scarf is also quite narrow (66 x 6 inches; 168 x 15 cm) and only costs 7 pence, probably reflecting the small amount of lace it includes. Unfortunately there are no illustrations showing how the scarves were worn, but the catalogue does give us a snapshot of what was available at the time.