clew's reviews: a book log

The Secrets of Real Lace, Elizabeth M. Kurella

This particular book is about how to identify how a piece of lace was made, so it has many comparative closeups of machine laces and the handmade 'real' laces they imitated. The oddity is that the worst fault of the machine laces - the one visible from more than three inches away - is their poor large-scale design. It seems as though it would have been technically possible for them to be designed as well as the handmade ones, or even better, or most likely exactly the same. Maybe the machines were awfully hard to program. (To look up: Lace Machines and Machine Laces, Pat Earnshaw, 1986. Lace was so valuable and the market for it so large that lacemaking machinery must have been at the edge of possibility - patterned knits by machine in the late seventeenth c., jacquard apparatus lace (?) by 1825.)

The main difference between the machine and hand lace, especially the (unbelievably labor-intensive) bobbin laces, is that the machine lace is done with more or fewer repetitions of only one or two stitches in one direction. Once the author points it out, it is easy to see the effect of that, something like a picture from a dot-matrix printer - even far away there's a direction and grain to the fabric that overrides the decorative pattern in it. Hand lace can completely change the direction and roughness and shape as well as the density of the stitch, so that the elements - petals, swags, feathers - are shaded and grained like the things they represent. The result is like good engraving of the same picture.

Under a magnifying glass, the surprise in bobbin lace is that there's no difference between the material design and the background; the regular threads from the tightly-twisted net in the background unplait, hop a tiny distance into a motif, participate in some quite different kind of weaving, and can come out of the motif to plait up with threads they were nowhere near on their way in.

I don't know where to file books on lace - art, technology, or clothing? Possibly all three.

ISBN: 0-9642871-0-2