Handmade History, Episode 9: A Brief History of Lace
Show Notes
This is our very first episode suggested by a listener! Thank you, Emily!
Lace is a huge topic. There is lace everywhere. It’s like tie-dye or nalbinding, only there’s much more information on it because the Victorians were super obsessed with it, which we will talk about later.
So, this is a very brief introduction, and I hope we’ll go down some rabbit holes in future episodes.
Early origins of the word
- French word
- Earliest use according to the OED is 1230 from a work called the Ancrene Riwle
- The Ancrene Riwle aka Ancrene Wisse is a book of rules for anchoresses or nuns.
- Anchoresses lived in the walls of churches. They were like public hermits
- Early uses of lace can also mean ties (as in shoelaces)
What is the lace that we are talking about?
- A definition from Merriam Webster is: “an ornamental braid for trimming coats or uniforms
- or “an openwork usually figured fabric made of thread or yarn and used for trimmings, household coverings, and entire garments”
- Typically white, made out of thread
- Intricate, pretty
- Tablecloths, curtains, lingerie
- Wedding dresses
- Made using a needle, bobbins, or using weaving techniques, and you can also crochet it. There are also knitting patterns that are lace.
- We typically think of lace as white, but
- Lace was often made out of black thread, gold, and silver
- Examples of these do not survive nearly as often as the white lace
- Black lace dissolved because of an acidic ingredient used to fix the dye
- Metal laces were often melted down
- It is unique in that it is completely useless. By definition it has no substance.
- Thomas Fuller, an English writer, said it is “a superfluous wearing, because it doth neither hide nor heat.”
- And as we will see, it is an economic force that has driven international regulation and domestic policy
Places that are associated with lace include
- Belgium (especially Flanders and Brussels), Spain, France, Italy, and England
- But as Mrs. Palliser wrote in an article in The Decorator and the Furnisher in 1890, “the same laces have been made in almost every country in Europe”
- We would say that lace has been made is almost every country, period
- Lace was made and spread by the Portuguese and the Dutch
- It was made in Switzerland - the source of the earliest lace pattern book
- It has traditions in India, Singapore, and Sri Lanka
- Lace was also made in Latin America by different indigenous groups
- Basically if you search lace + any country or region in the world, you can find an interesting tradition there
- Helen Anderson wrote in another issue of the same magazine that year, “We cannot go back to the time when mention of lace is not made in some form or other.”
Pre-1500s
- Lace made by various people in Latin America as early as the 1000s CE
- Chancay people in the Andes, along the west coast of South America, made lace that is called “Chancay gauze”
- It looks a like filet crochet, most similar to bobbin lace
- It includes images and it can also be beautiful abstract patterns
- This was done before the Inca took over - the Inca ruled South America when the conquistadors came
- Incredible techniques:
- Made using very tightly wound single-ply yarn
- Sometimes the yarn was varied in how tightly it was wound to make different effects on the finished product
- Yarns were held taught on a loom and then released
- Still done today. Saw a video of a modern person doing it–he didn’t learn it from his family, but was self-taught and he said he liked it because it was a good challenged, it was different and more difficult
- Later, when the Spaniards arrived in the 1400s and 1500s they brought needle and bobbin lace
- The traditions intermixed
- Another fabric at this time was an Incan textile called the cumbi, which was a very fine woven fabric
- It’s woven so that both sides look amazing
- This was not lace, but interestingly, the tradition of the cumbi absorbed the influences of the Spanish colonizers
- Cumbi with a pattern woven into it that looked like lace
Lace and Spain (extremely briefly)
- Two types of lace that became popular in Spain were called Blonde and Chantilly lace, and they lasted in popularity long after they stopped being popular in the rest of Europe
- Quick story that is mostly not factual, but it is fun
- There is a legend that Catherine of Aragon, who married King Henry VIII in 1509, brought lacemaking to England
- It’s probably not true
- Story: The lacemakers were out of work, so Catherine burned all of her lace and ordered new lace from the lacemakers
- November 25 was celebrated as Cattern’s Day - holiday for lacemakers
A lot of European lace came from Italy
- Venice and Florence both lacemaking hotbeds
- A lot of lace worn in ecclesiastical (church) garments
- Made by nuns
- A theory of how lace was invented:
- It started as embroidered cutwork, which is when you embroider a design and then cut away the extra fabric in between
- Other methods of doing cutwork start with a “web of threads”
- In the 1500s pattern books were printed in Italy, a famous one was by Frederick Vinciolo from Venice
However, the earliest lace pattern book we have was actually printed in Zurich, Switzerland, based on Italian designs
- It is called the Nüw Modelbuch by R.M. (probably a woman): The New Pattern Book
- Full title: New Pattern book of all kinds of bobbin laces currently popular in Upper Germany, created for teaching female students and all other lace ribbon workers in Zurich and elsewhere. Prepared for the first time from original works by R.M.
- Published in 1561
- Copy made by Clare Burkhard for a museum in Basel, translated into English, French and German, amazing
- I found a great modern translation by Helen Hough which she made in 2018
- It contains 164 patterns, is about 50 illustrated pages long, and it has an alphabetic index of the patterns which wasn’t common at the time! But is so helpful!
- There are only 5 in total worldwide
- One sold in October of 2018 for $38,000
- R.M. wrote that she was a teacher of lacemaking
- Gave a brief history of lace in the introduction, saying lace came to Switzerland in 1536 from Venice and “other parts of Italy”
- “Sensible women and girls” wanted to learn how to make it
- They made a collective:
- “They united to make and market the lace, agreeing to share everything in proportion to work each person did”
- “Lace is in great demand and workshops have grown up in many places and will likely continue to do so”
- Used Italian designs and made their own
- Noted that heavier or finer threads could be used to make designs look different
- Made lace with flax, silk, and metallic threads
- RM published this herself by hiring a printer, Christoff Froschauer, a Zurich printer “who has special understanding of art and textile design”
- You can use this lace book today if you like - it’s online. Amazing!
1500s and 1600s: a pinnacle of lace in Europe
- Worn by men and women
- Lace was especially used in ruffs, which took a lot of lace
- For example, Lord Dorset, husband of Lady Anne Clifford of England, a famous baroness, mentioned the “green and black silk lace” on his coach in his will in 1624
- Samuel Pepys, who is famous for keeping a diary in the 1600s, wrote on Aug. 12, 1664, that he went to “Stevens the silversmith to change some old silver lace” and then went to “buy new silk lace for a petticoat”
- Lace showed political and social status
- Great story from The Golden Thread, book by Kassia St. Clair:
- “When in 1577 King Henry III of France sought to intimidate the Estates-General (an assembly of groups of his subjects), he turned up to a meeting wearing 4000 yards of gold lace.”
- Queen Elizabeth wore a ton of lace
- She bought most of it from Alice Montagne, a silk and linen dealer
- In a famous portrait of Queen Elizabeth’s by Nicholas Hilliard, Hilliard actually thickened the paint he used to make the lace and it is actually dimensional (it sticks up!)
- In 1576, she bought 27 pounds of lace
- Spent 9,535 pounds on clothing over the last four years of her reign
- But wait listen!
- The next monarch of England was King James, and he spend 36,777 pounds in his very first year on lace
- Bought over 1,100 pounds of lace
- Lace wasn’t just for the upper classes
- There is a 1588 bed cover that survives that has an image of a siren combing her hair and it includes the words “Virtue isn’t everything”
- Probably belonged to a courtesan
Foreign lace in other lands
- In England, Venetian lace was extremely popular
- Under Queen Elizabeth I, no one less than the rank of “gentleman” could wear foreign lace while attending the queen
- In France, King Louis XIV, the Sun King, imported a ton of Venetian lace
- In the boats that road around the canals of Versailles, the windows had Venetian lace curtains
- This actually led to an international incident
- Jean-Baptiste Colbert, the minister of finance and trade, wanted the Sun King to spend his money on the French people
- The type of lace that Louis XIV loved was called point de venise
- Colbert spearheaded the creation of point de France
- In 1665, he set up factories
- Worked with the French ambassador in Venice to steal trade secrets, like how much different types of lace cost and how much lacemakers could be expected to produce
- Many of these letters were in code!
- Asked royal designers and painters to make new designs for point de france
- He invited lacemakers from Italy (and Flanders, Belgium) to immigrate to France and offered them citizenship
- Italy retaliated, decreeing that no lacemakers should leave and those that had should come back and be executed for treason
This is an example of the kinds of the foreign/domestic policy that lace drove in Europe in the 1600s.
At this same time, lace was made by many people in many countries
- Mrs. Palliser: “Much that is delicate and charming in design has been the work, not the pretty pastime, of the poor.”
- In Ghent, Belgium, in 1589, a law was passed against servants quitting to become lacemakers
- In 1649 a similar law was passed in Toulouse, France
From Europe, colonizers also spread lace to other parts of the world
Goa, India
- Lace brought by Portuguese nuns who established Santa Monica Church & Convent in 1606
- Made lace with a “hooked needle” - could be crochet or needle lace
- Worn in regular and ceremonial clothes
- From Goa, spread to other places in South India, and Malacca (city in Malaysia)
Portuguese nuns had also brought lace to Sri Lanka in the mid-1500s
- There, lace adorned women’s clothes
- This was bobbin lace
- Today, the National Crafts Council runs training centers which support more than 300 families
- Modern lacemakers export home linens
Machine lace invented in France in 1820
However, the handmade lace tradition continued
For example, in Belgium:
- Point de gaze debuted at the 1851 Crystal Palace Exhibition in London
- This lace was “one of the last of the great, entirely handmade laces developed and offered commercially” in an exhibit at the SFO Museum (in the airport)
- However, Mrs. Palliser wrote about lace made in Brussels in 1890
- Used very fine flax thread which can cost $1200/lb (more than $40,000 today)
- Spun underground because air can damage it
- Also mentioned lace made in Ypres
- Made lace with “bold, flowing patterns” that could cost $400/yard (almost $14,000 today)
- Took a lacemaker working 12 hours/day to make ⅓ inch each week
- Used 1200 bobbins
- She said “In almost every other branch of art or commerce the introduction of machinery has immediately reduced the value of the handmade article; but with lace the effect ahs been very different; it has rather increased the value of real lace, although much of the machine-made lace is very beautiful and very wonderful in its delicacy, it has not as yet attained the exquisite softness and richness of handmade lace.”
Victorians and lace
- At this same time, the late 1800s, Isabella Stewart Gardner was assembling her collection
- Other Victorians were interested in lace, like Mrs. Palliser and Helen Anderson, who wrote articles about it (Mrs. Palliser also wrote an entire book on the history of lace)
- From the Gardner museum website: “Gardner’s lace collection is distinguished by its sheer variety, both in technique and provenance.”
- Comes from France, Belgium, Spain, and Italy
- She traveled to these places and also shopped in New York, where lace was imported
- Over 177 examples
- Most not shown, because of sensitivity to light
- “Although the majority of early 20th century American museums collected lace, Isabella was unique in her ability to select the most exquisite pieces. Her unusual knowledge of fine lace made her museum a haven for lovers of textiles.”
- It’s possible the Victorians were worried about losing the handmade examples of lace
Thank you for listening!
We mentioned San Diego Sewn’s Wrap LA in Love quilt project. You can find it here: https://sandiegosewn.com/blogs/san-diego-sewn-sharing-the-experience/wrap-la-in-love
And send any lap-sized or larger quilt, new or gently used, to a family who has lost their home in the fires.
Email us at handmadehistoryhosts@gmail.com - we’d love to hear your suggestions!
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Sources:
https://www.gardnermuseum.org/blog/isabellas-lace
https://www.laceguild.org/a-brief-history-of-lace
https://www.gardnermuseum.org/experience/collection/13696
https://www.oed.com/dictionary/lace_n?tab=factsheet
https://archive.org/details/NewModelbook1561
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lappet#/media/File:Framptons.jpg
https://www.jstor.org/stable/25136406
https://www.craftsy.com/post/how-to-filet-crochet/
https://elinorofkentdale.wordpress.com/filet-lace-tutorial/
https://www.jstor.org/stable/26405466
https://www.jstor.org/stable/25586125
https://www.in2013dollars.com/us/inflation/1890?amount=1200
https://www.sfomuseum.org/exhibitions/lace-sumptuous-history/gallery#1
https://parker.stanford.edu/parker/catalog/zh635rv2202
https://artsandculture.google.com/story/singapore-sarong-kebaya-and-style-peranakan-fashion-national-heritage-board-singapore/6AVxGAwa3F7DJA?hl=en
https://asiainch.org/craft/lace-work/
https://www.indiainch.org/craft/lace-and-crochet-embroidery-of-goa/
https://lacesouthamerica.commons.bgc.bard.edu/
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/lace
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ofq_nGwLTD8
https://lacemakersproject.com/patron-saints-of-lacemaking/#:~:text=In%20her%201875%20book%20History,Day%2C%20the%2025th%20November%2C%20as
https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portrait/mw02074/Queen-Elizabeth-I
Book: The Golden Thread by Kassia St. Clair (affiliate link: we get a small commission if you purchase at this link at no cost to you)
Also, Alicia got the book Echoes by Susan Crawford for Christmas this year. The pattern she mentioned is actually called Agatha, not Marple!