Saturday, April 16, 2016

Antique Lace

From Victoria:
Such motherly sentimentality lies at the heart of these keepsakes, whose creation initially was women’s work. Lace making, which has been traced to the sixteenth century, was a cottage industry, and the first pieces were designed to dress up the costly costumes of the European nobility. Each country produced its own handmade designs until the nineteenth century, when machine-made lace was manufactured for the middle-class market. Today, lace from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, although perhaps not the most collectible, is the most available. Choices include Battenburg, a highly textured variety with fanciful flowers; Normandy, a patchwork of different types of French lace; needle lace, whose diaphanous design is formed from hundreds, even thousands of small stitches; crochet lace; Alençon, the so-called “Queen of Lace,” from France, that resembles snowflakes; and net, the whisper-fine lace that serves as a background for all manner of embroidered decoration. (Read more.)
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