Dear Karen, It would not seem that it would be that hard to find out something like this, yet I have been looking in my books for confirmation of my gut feeling about it, and am surprised at how difficult it is to verify. My gut feeling is that it arose in the last two decades of the 18th century when the motifs had shrunk to teeny tiny little flowers and borders. In looking for this, the first problem is that the term âpoint groundâ does not come up in my various identification and history books. Instead I am substituting Tulle, Lille, fond simple and fond clair. Regarding Lille, Gwyne, The Illustrated Dictionary of Lace, says, âA continuous bobbin lace with a Fond Simple ground (Bobbin Ground C, page. 198), adopted from late C18. A larger mesh was used from 1803. The Cloth stitch designs were outlined with coarse flat gimp. The toile of the laces in C 18 was mainly gimp, with very little cloth stitch in the design. There is more, but, interestingly part of it reads, âThe laces of Buckinghamshire, England, are thought to have been copies of Lille designs and technique, brought to England by refugees. The difference between these two laces is not easy to detect, but the Lille deisgns are smaller than tose of Buckinghamshire, and possibly a fraction more âfinger likeâ. Nevertheless they are virtually indistinguishable.â Devon
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