When Sheila and John Mason visited the Ratti with the panel Mr. Mason mentioned that Sheila was to appear on "Flog It". Mr. Mason's family has been machine lace manufacturers in Nottingham for about 8 generations and he has a wealth of information which he very kindly shared with us about machine made lace. Having been apprenticed at the age of 14 in the business he knows a great deal about lace manufacture in Nottingham generally. I hope they had as good a time as we did. However, an interesting question has arisen. What is the market value of exceptional machine made lace? I had originally contacted Sheila because I was contacted by a man who owns a panel called The Lace Merchant. It is a large machine made panel which comes with a parchment saying it won First Prize at the Worlds Fair in Lyon in 1893. This piece was pictured in a book by David Schwab, The Story of Lace and Handkerchiefs. The piece formerly belonged to Mr. Schwab. The owner thought it might be quite valuble and wanted to establish a value. Unfortunately we were unable to do this. Values attributable to handmade lace don't seem to apply and no one I talked to knew of anything to compare it to that had sold recently. A few telephone inquiries brought opinions varying from "not worth much" because it may have been mass produced, to "I saw a documentary in which Quaker Lace tablecloths were being sold for $30,000 at auction". The Metropolitan Museum of Art also has a copy of this panel, but Sheila Mason had never seen it before. Our copy was donated by a well-known lace manufacturer. Sheila Mason felt the panel was produced only in very small quantity and thought it might be fairly valuble. It was made on a Pusher machine, which hasn't been used for a long time and is really quite an elaborate piece, being a single picture about 30" by 55". It shows a 18th century lace merchant showing lace to a lady. There are many different laces displayed, all reproduced by machine. However, even Sheila could not provide a monetary value, saying the only way to tell would be to put it up for auction. Machine lace is still emerging as a valuble entity and many museums don't even have machine made lace in their collections, although the Met has about 60 examples, some of them quite exceptional. One is a portrait of George Washington and one has a locomotive, light bulbs and all sorts of other symbols of progress on it. One depicts the Spirit of St. Louis and one has Charlie Chaplin and his dog on it. Does anybody have any thoughts about machine made lace and value as a collectible? Devon
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