In the 17th century there were laces made from premade tapes. The tapes were tacked onto a pattern and filled with often very beautiful and elaborate needle lace stitches. These tapes look to be of woven linen. When the tapes go around a curve they are gathered, or turned over, so it is quite clear that they were not made with bobbins on a pillow with the patten on it, in which case the maker would have shaped the tape Does anyone know how or where these tapes were produced? Were they produced on a little loom, like a ribbon loom? Santina Levey discusses this kind of lace on p. 23 of her book under the heading "Tape Lace". She does not speak of how the tapes were made. A cursory search of the internet results in the claim that tapes for Mezzo Punto were either woven or made with bobbins. However, I don't know whether to believe that premade tapes were ever made with bobbins. This may be a bit of misinformation repeated over and over again due to generalized statements in which tapes laces such as Milanese are conflated with Mezzo Punto. I would think it would be much easier to make such tapes with a small loom. However, my colleague who weaves thinks it might be easier to make them with bobbins. When one looks at classification of these laces in collections, some are classified as needle lace, whereas others are classified as bobbin lace, perhaps on the theory that the tapes which appear to be woven are "bobbin lace". However, the more skilled and remarkable work on the lace is the needle lace in my opinion. I am trying to figure out how they should be classified. Devon P.S. In the 19th and early 20th century there were laces based on these early laces such as Battenburg lace that were quite popular. It is often the case that these are also called Mezzo Punto. In fact, it may be that only in the 19th century did they start to call the tape based laces of the 17th century Mezzo Punto, so this adds to the confusion. I am assuming that all the tapes in the 19th and 20th century were machine woven.
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