I always think it’s a little like cooking: Seven people make Irish Stew. This
one cuts her carrots crosswise into buttons, that one quarters her carrots and
cuts them into chunks. Everybody’s potatoes look a little different. This one
leaves out one ingredient. That one likes to put in plenty of parsnips. They
are all making Irish Stew.
Then people who don’t know much about cooking show up, and start labelling the
stews. This one is from the lady on Broad Street. This man lives over by the
park. That cook works in a restaurant. The restaurant down the street makes it
a different way. And so Broad Street Stew, Park Stew, and Restaurant Stew are
born - and there are two different kinds of Restaurant Stew, and people who
learn about the two will argue forever about which one is the real, true stew.
That’s the sort of thing that has happened in the lacemaking world. There are
hundreds of years of vibrant history. Sometimes lacemakers moved long
distances. The might be refugees or they might have been deliberately brought
in to an impoverished area, to bring in a new way to make money. They teach the
lace from the place they come from but it changes slowly over the years, and by
the time the collectors and labellers show up it is noticeably different and
gets its own label. Or, sometimes two laces are basically the same, but then
people will pick and poke at them because they’re sure there must be
differences because they come from two different places.
That is why museum workers tear their hair out trying to figure out how to
label laces (I’m sure Devon will chime in about her travails). We can broadly
separate laces by the techniques used - point ground laces, for example. The
laces you mention fall into that category, along with many Continental laces
like Tonder, Bayeux, Chantilly … Then there are tape laces, part laces like
Honiton and Duchesse …
Then there are some funny hiccups, like how Honiton lace was not made in
Honiton and I’ve been told a lot of Valenciennes was made at Binche and vice
versa. In the interests of clarity I think our geographic way of naming laces
should be superseded by some other method. But I’m not in charge of these
things ;-)
Adele
West Vancouver, BC
(west coast of Canada)
> On Jan 23, 2019, at 10:15 AM, Susan wrote:
>
> What differentiates one from another?! To prepare for some lace study visits,
> I am making samples of Bucks, Devon Trolly, Downton & Malmesbury plus a few
> items from the Luton Museum lace dealer’s pattern book. As I was leafing thru
> several books, I stopped dead in my tracks. Some patterns looked very similar
> to Little pea, plum pudding & maids in a row—except I wasn’t looking at a
> book on Bucks! Say what!?! It made me wonder, if these lace samples were all
> spread out on a table, how would they be identified? Thread—they all seem to
> be cotton (so far). Thread weight—some seem a bit finer. Individual
> motifs—there’s definitely a lot of crossover in shapes & fillings. Bucks
> seems to feature more florals, otherwise the geometric components are highly
> similar. Multiple grounds are mentioned but is this the defining feature of
> each? Or is it the combination of shapes/motifs that separates Luton from
> Bucks etc? What Am I missing in my first cursory observations? Sug!
ge!
> stions are welcome. Many thanks. Sincerely, Susan Hottle, Florida USA
>
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