Bayeux – Tapestry and Lace
February 28, 2012 at 7:25 pm | Posted in Embroidery, Lace, Museums and Exhibitions | 1 CommentAfter entering Normandy through its lace-making corner, I finally arrived in Bayeux, famous mostly for the tapestry that wasn’t even made here. The town greeted me with grey clouds and drizzles, but being that near to the atlantic coast, that’s par for the course. Bayeux had been on my list of places to visit from the moment I started planning this trip, and it didn’t disappoint at all. It’s a very pretty if a bit touristy town, and then there’s this:
Yup, that’s the museum that houses the famous tapestry. Totally worth it. The tapestry is housed in a specially built gallery on the ground floor of the museum, and I was variously advised to just go see the tapestry and skip the rest. The reputedly very good audio guide tells the story. Being not a particular fan of audio guides in general, I skipped that part and went into the gallery without having to hold something to my ear. What the audio guide seems to do is guide the visitors along the tapestry in a steady pace—good for moving lots of people along. Besides, I wasn’t there for the history, but for the needlework. So I hung back a bit, sought out the spaces in the neverending line of visitors, and admired the details. Even though there’s not really enough light for drawing in the gallery, I found myself a bench in the back and came up with this little tree:
Going back and forth a few times along the tapestry, I tried to take it all in, and when I’d seen enough, I checked out the rest of the museum. My advice would be not to skip that part, as tempting as it may seem. There’s lots of background regarding the history the tapestry shows, there’s an interesting video shown, and there may be special exhibits. I think I spent at least another hour in there.
As in most museums, you can’t get to the exit without going through the shop. Lots of merchandise, of course, and for once there was something I fancied: embroidery kits where you can recreate parts of the tapestry. A must-have souvenir for me. However, I didn’t get mine in the museum shop. When wandering around town the evening before, I noticed a small shop opposite the cathedral displaying those patterns. I was hoping to find a better selection there, and skipped the museum shop. In the shop, I found lots of patterns, including one I fancied and got, and a very friendly proprietor happy to show the technique. In addition to the traditional pieces, she also creates modern patterns using the old stitches. She also has an online shop, so you can do some virtual window shopping. Don’t get lost! Voilà, here’s my embroidered little tree:
Although the empasis is on the tapestry, there’s more needlework to be found. Bayeux has its own kind of bobbin lace, and there’s a lace school/shop you can visit right next to the embroidery shop. Unfortunately, the big city museum is currently closed due to renovations going on, but ordinarily there’d be more lace to be found there. I think that’s a good reason to go back to Bayeux once the museum has reopened.
Like this:
Alençon and Argentan – the homes of French Needlelace
February 14, 2012 at 8:37 pm | Posted in Lace, Museums and Exhibitions | Leave a commentTags: needlelace
Being a big admirer of needlelaces, Alençon and Argentan were very high on my list of places to visit in France. Both towns are preserving their history in the lace-making business, and the museums are splendid places to explore.
First up, Alençon. There’s a nice old town to see there, with a big church and interesting architecture. Sorry, no pics, since I managed not to take any. The Musée des Beaux-Arts et de la Dentelle is situated in an old building, and combines the town’s history in lace-making with an eclectic collection of paintings and sculptures. The big draw for me was of course the lace. On the ground floor there’s a small “appetizer” room, giving a glimpse of what’s still to come. Apart from fine examples of needlelaces from different time periods, there’s a table where different kinds of laces are on open display, and you’re invited to touch and study them, and then take a guess at which kind of lace you’re looking. Easy for somebody who’s been interested in lace for a long time, you’d think – and I did get most samples right on the first try. But hand- and machine-made bobbin laces still confuse me, and this was no exception to that rule. Shows that machines can make a very realistic imitation of bobbin lace.
The first floor was mainly dedicated to paintings, and after a quick look round I went to explore the second floor – and was blown away. There’s a huge room full of mostly big pieces of lace on all the walls and in display cases in the middle. While the emphasis is on Alençon lace, a lot of other types of needlelace are also on show, so you can compare the different types. I went round the room two or three times, seeing something new and different each time. There’s a display explaining the technique of making needlelace on one wall, and a video is shown in an adjacent room showing the past and present of Alençon lace. The technique of making Alençon lace is part of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity since fall 2010, and lace is actively produced by a workshop situated next to the museum. Some of the pieces produced are on sale in the museum, and they’re incredible. To put the price tags into perspective, next to each piece there’s the number of hours it took to make it as well. Tiny pieces, huge number of hours. Looking at this makes you appreciate the huge amount of work that must have gone into making the big pieces in the museum gallery even more. All in all, an amazing place to visit, and one I’d definitely like to get back to another time.
The following day, I continue to Argentan. The town is considerably smaller, there’s another big church, and the lace museum is housed in a tiny building:
That tiny building houses a small but interesting museum. The right side of the ground floor houses the permanent part of the exhibition, showing the different types of French laces. On the left side a video is shown and there’s a small shop. The special exhibition upstairs is a pleasant surprise: “Dentelles d’ailleurs” – Laces from abroad shows laces from lots of different countries. In addition to European laces there’s also stuff made in Asia or America. Being able to see the different traditions on display next to each other is great fun.
All in all, two very enjoyable days in a part of France I probably wouldn’t have visited if it weren’t for the lace that was and is being made there.
Calais – Cité de la dentelle
November 30, 2011 at 7:07 pm | Posted in Lace, Museums and Exhibitions | Leave a commentMy next stop was Calais. One of the biggest harbours for passenger travel in the world, Calais is mostly a town people pass through on their way to or from a ferry. That’s exactly what happened to me on a few earlier visits. A journal article on the opening of the Cité de la Dentelle et de la Mode in Calais convinced me to make Calais a stop on my tour. And it was a great decision, for experiencing a charming coastal town, sitting on the beach and watching the ferries as well as for a great and modern museum.
The view from outside already suggests the content: an old factory building was enlarged with a modern part sporting an undulating glass front—history and present combined into one attractive package. Looking closer, that glass front is decorated with punch card patterns!
Inside, there’s everything and more than expected. The permanent exhibition starts with a room displaying old laces. The room is pretty dark to protect the fragile textiles, and only gets lit a bit more when somebody enters. The laces are very thoughtfully presented—a whole history of hand-made laces in one room. Marvelous! Even though I’ve seen handmade laces in quite a few different museums by now, having all the different kinds in one room and being able to trace the development of lace following the pieces exhibited is great.
At the end of that room there’s a small hands-on area demonstrating how the different types of laces are made. You can try your hand at bobbin- and needle lace making using the ropes attached there, nothing small and fiddly! Since I already know the principles of making those laces, what was more interesting to me in that area was a presentation of the materials used: they took a small bobbin-lace pattern and made it up in cotton, linen, wool, and silk. Since the four pieces are otherwise identical, you can compare how the properties of the thread influence the final product: the sheen of silk, the crispness of linen, the fuzzyness of wool can easily be seen. It’s no wonder that linen was the traditional material for lace-making, since it brings out the pattern so clearly.
The next room delves into the history of Calais as a center of machine lace making. The impulse and the machines coming over from England, it’s no surprise that this harbour town became a center of the trade. Lots of different exhibits document that part of the town’s history.
Up one floor, there’s four Leavers looms in working order being used to demonstrate. Even though I had seen a working loom in Caudry the day before, it was still fascinating. I could watch those machines for hours. In the next room, the whole process of machine-lace making from design to finishing is shown, and all the machines needed for this.
Lace is of course used in fashion, and the next room has a selection of lace garments of different times and styles on display. Always fun to look closer at the details.
Just when I thought I was at the end of the exhibition, there’s another room, combining a couple of different purposes: There’s a part of the room showing how modern materials and production technologies have influenced the medium, and there’s space for special exhibitions. When I was there, there was a presentation of objects playing with lace effects using different materials.
What else is there? A library with specialized books, a café, and of course a museum shop with a huge selection of books and presents. I thoroughly enjoyed my visit, and would come again in a heartbeat given the opportunity.
Next stop? Paris!
Caudry: Musée de la Dentelle
November 7, 2011 at 10:45 am | Posted in Lace, Museums and Exhibitions | Leave a commentTags: Leavers lace, machine lace
The first needlework-related stop on my trip to France was in Caudry, which is one of very few places in France where lace is still being produced today. I first found out about Caudry lace when it found its way into the headlines earlier this year: the lace that was deconstructed and attached in small pieces to Kate Middleton’s wedding dress was originally produced in Caudry. You can find out more about the process of making that dress from the Royal School of Needlework’s press release (PDF Link).
A little bit of googling later, I knew there was a museum to be visited in Caudry. The Musée de la Dentelle de Caudry is small but definitely worth the visit. The building is a mixture of old and new:
The entrance and museum boutique is in the new glass building, the actual museum space in the old part. The subject of the museum is introduced by a short video, which is available with subtitles in quite a few languages. Afterwards a lace maker shows you around the ground floor, showing the whole process of machine lace-making from start to finish. Although the tour is in French, the guide was doing a lot more showing than telling, so I was able to follow things quite easily despite my mediocre French. I find the complexity of the technology involved breathtaking no matter how often I see those machines, and seeing one of them work will never lose its fascination to me. The Leavers looms come originally from England. I have been to their birthplace in Nottingham before, but never seen one in action, I needed to come to France for this. There’s two sets of Jacquard punch cards involved, three different sets of threads, and loads and loads of moving parts.
The first floor had a temporary exhibition of lace in fashion, with lots of lace on display. Of course there also was a current display with information about the lace used for the wedding dress of the year. After all, that’s something to be proud of!
My overall impression? It’s a place definitely worth a visit if you’re interested in the past and present of machine lace making. When walking back to the bus stop afterwards I came across this door with some exquisite metal lace in front:
Lace everywhere!
Needlepoint Lace—Flower Motif
February 8, 2009 at 8:23 pm | Posted in Lace | 3 CommentsTags: Encyclopedia of Needlework, Needlepoint Lace
I’ve made another little bit of progress on my needlepoint lace motif from the Encyclopedia of Needlework and managed to finish all the lace fillings:
And while only practice makes perfect, even a little bit of practice helps a lot in how my stitches turn out, as you can see in this detail of the flower:
I worked from the left to the right, and the fillings are symmetrical on both sides. You can clearly see that things went way better on the right side, when I already got the hang of the filling. The difficulty lies usually in the irregular forms of the motifs, so I have to start and end lines in different places and space the stitches correctly. So, any kind of stitch practice, as in a sampler with lots of squares, wouldn’t really help me. Properly inserting the fillings into those irregular spaces does take practice, and this kind of practice only comes with working more pieces of this.
So, on to the last step, buttonholing the outline. Since this is a relatively large piece of lace, this will be a major task, so don’t expect me to be finished by next week. In the Encyclopedia, this piece is shown with two different kinds of outline: The normal one as described in my Tutorial, and the high relief used in traditional Venetian lace:
I’m tempted to give this a try with this piece, though it’s a lot of work and probably a mess keeping all those padding threads in line. I’ll report back, hopefully soon, on how things are going.
Mastery
January 18, 2009 at 7:20 pm | Posted in Fiber Art, Lace, Past – Present – Future | 2 CommentsWhile cleaning up my crafts area, I came across a piece in progress that I’ve last shown in this post, over a year ago. So I started fiddling with it again, and made some more progress:
As I got back into the project, I realized that achieving any kind of consistency with the lace stitches would take a lot of practice, and that is not very likely to happen when I can forget something in the corner for a year at times while being busy with other things. The problem is that I’m interested in way too many things to have the time and patience to achieve mastery in any one of them. I’m more interested in trying out things and understanding the basics of something than I am in knowing everything about one thing. No, that’s not quite right, I’d happily learn all about one thing if that wouldn’t steal time from other interesting pursuits.
With the amount of knowledge available today and multiplying every day, it’s become impossible to get even an overview of what’s out there to know, much less aquiring detailed knowledge in several fields at once. Most of us have had to become specialists in a narrow field out of necessity, since the body of knowledge even in a small field can be vast. The internet is playing its own role in making lots of knowledge available to everybody at the other end of a search. So, being naturally curious about a lot of things, fibery or not, I get drawn in all directions and never put in the time to go really far into one topic.
But why should I want to? While it might be nice to be a specialist in whatever area, I think having just basic knowledge of many different fields has its own benefits. One of the goals of this blog is to help keeping as many old needlecrafts as possible alive and well. And alive for me doesn’t mean 5 people on the planet know perfectly how to do it, but as many people as possible have tried it with a simple project and know the basics. If then a few people fall in love with a craft and want to go deeper, so much the better. So I think I’ll go on providing tutorials and patterns for small projects in whatever craft takes my fancy next, and stop worrying about achieving mastery in any of them.
Holiday Gifts
December 29, 2008 at 8:50 pm | Posted in Crochet, Knitting, Lace | Leave a commentNow that the holidays are over and I’m slowly catching my breath, I’ll try to catch up with what’s going on in the fiber department. We left the Waves of Grain scarf still blocking on the sofa in the last installment. After taking it off and admiring it, I decided the gift wrapping needed to fit with the contents.
I started by making an Irish crochet flower from gold-coloured thread:
The pattern for the flower is from Thérèse de Dillmont’s Irish Crochet Lace, which I found on the Weaving Digital Archives, which despite of its name has lots of goodies for all kinds of needlecraft. It’s the Third Wheel (fig. 17) on pages 9 and 10 of the book. Together with the red and gold wrapping paper it gives the present a festive look:
Since I couldn’t get any pictures in daylight before wrapping the present, I had to wait for it to be unwrapped again. My mom was really happy about this totally unexpected present, and I even managed to take a few pics in bright daylight over the holidays:
Of course there was more knitting going on over the holidays, but more on this in a later post.
Finishing my First Lace Scarf
December 14, 2008 at 3:34 pm | Posted in Knitting, Lace | 1 CommentThings are moving considerably slower at the moment since I managed to break something in my right shoulder last week. But I still managed to finish Waves of Grain, the Christmas present for my mum. This project has several firsts for me: first project with laceweight yarn, first time knitting with beads, first time using kitchener stitch with a lace pattern, and first time blocking. I really wasn’t sure what I’m doing here, but things seem to work out just fine.
The project is worked in two halves starting from the ends and needed to be grafted together in the middle. The pattern recommends to knit a row with waste yarn on each side and then graft the parts together following the path of the waste yarn, but after trying this a couple of times and not succeeding I decided to take the waste yarn out and put the stitches on tow straight needles. I then used regular kitchener stitch to sew the parts together. After a bit of fiddling at the start that worked perfectly fine. Here’s the result in close-up (click to see details):
I then proceeded to give wet blocking a try. Here’s the scarf on my blocking board (usually used as a sofa 
) before blocking:
And here it is again after pinning it out. I used a big garbage bag to prevent the water from getting into the sofa.
Looks really nice, and I’ll be happy to give it away as a present. I’ll post a pic of the finished scarf later.
Tatted Necklace
November 9, 2008 at 4:06 pm | Posted in Lace | Leave a commentTags: Jewellery, Tatting
Having the tatted earrings come out nicely, I had how to extend the idea to a matching necklace. So, after picking up a few more of the big beads and a steel wire necklace from the craft shop, I started playing with the pattern. Here’s the result:
I put beads on every ring in the pattern again, and added the big beads in the middle on the steel wire. The tatted ornament is attached using picots in the right places, two next to each other. I put one of the smaller beads between each pair of picots on the wire. The pattern is not perfect, as it’s not easily lying flat, but it works, and I now have a documented starting point to play with.
The ornament is made with one shuttle and attached ball of yarn. You need 13 beads for the picots in the ornaments. Those need to go on the thread before winding it on the shuttle. While winding, distribute the beads on the shuttle, so they’re safely buried in there. This can be a bit tricky because it’s hard to estimate when you’ll need each bead, but for me it worked with just an additional bit of unwinding and rewinding.
In the instructions, the numbers mean double knots, “-” a picot, “+” attach to picot, “B” a picot with a bead. Be careful to put one bead on each ring before starting it.
Ring: 6-3 B 3-6 Chain: 4-2-4-2 Ring: 6+4 B 4-6 Chain: 2 Ring: 6+5 B 5-6 Chain: 2 Ring: 6+4 B 4-6 Chain: 2+4-2-6 Ring: 6+4 B 4-6 Chain: 8-2 Ring: 6+4 B 4-6 Chain: 2 Ring: 6+5 B 5-6 Chain: 2 Ring: 6+4 B 4-6 Chain: 2+8 Ring: 6+4 B 4-6 Chain: 6-2-4-2 Ring: 6+4 B 4-6 Chain: 2 Ring: 6+5 B 5-6 Chain: 2 Ring: 6+4 B 4-6 Chain: 2+4-2-4 Ring: 6-3 B 3-6
And here’s the completed necklace together with the earrings:
This was really fun, but if I want to continue playing with jewellery, I guess I’ll have to acquire an additional set of tools!
Needlework for Today
October 15, 2008 at 4:53 pm | Posted in Lace, Past – Present – Future | 3 CommentsWhen I finished reading “Lace in Fashion,” the last few paragraphs really got me thinking:
Lace existed long before it became fashion, but it was fashion which miraculously transformed its techniques into a perfection of thread-movements and designs of surpassing beauty and transcendent skill. That such laces could ever exist, and that some have survived, is our good fortune. Only bad social conditions, embodying a form of slave labour, ever made them possible on a large commercial scale. With improvements in conditions that conjugation passed, and antique laces are no longer replaceable.
While I have known this for some time now, it still makes me sad to see hand-made laces become a lost art, something we can admire in a few museums as a memory of times past. On the other hand, I admire the ingenuity of the engineers who developed the machines that made machine-made laces possible und thus lace affordable for almost everyone, not only a select few. I think we need to celebrate the achievements of engineering, since the present and future of lace definitely lies in that direction. We’d be crazy not to make use of those marvellous machines.
But there’s something mass production cannot achieve: whatever most of us buy in a shop, we can be sure that hundreds or thousands of identical pieces of clothing are sold. True individuality is not possible that way. And it is in this area I think that hand-crafted items of all kinds will have a future. Pat Earnshaw’s outlook on the future of lacemaking looks pretty bleak to me:
It is thus of immense importance not only that all actual surviving pieces of lace from the past should be cherished, but also that lace-makers, by actively perpetuating the ancient techniques, should preserve for posterity our knowledge of how they were made.
Of course it’s important to preserve the old pieces and the techniques used to make them, but the art of lacemaking will still be dead if we can’t develop ways to use hand-made laces that are suitable for today’s fashion. Huge pieces of hand-made lace are impossible today for the reasons already stated above. But what of smaller, even tiny ones? A small accessory or a piece of jewellery incorporating hand-made lace could be that touch that makes a store-bought outfit special. And the time investment needed to create a small piece wouldn’t be forbidding. One of the reasons why I like needlepoint lace so much is the complete freedom in choice of pattern together with a very small investment in materials to get started. But of course other types of lace could work, too. I’ve got lots of ideas for different objects and will keep you updated about any progress I make. Why not play along? If you don’t know how to start, my Needlepoint Lace Tutorial can help you with this. I’d be happy to see your results!
While the book that got me thinking about those topics again talks specifically about lace, similar arguments apply to other time-intensive needlecrafts as well. Have a look through the Encyclopedia of Needlework, and you’ll see quite a few things almost noone knows how to do anymore. Creating small pieces just to try out the techniques and make something unique would be a good way to go here as well.
I think just preserving the techniques for the sake of preserving them will not be enough to save them in the long run. Finding new uses for them in today’s fashion world might just do the trick, though. The recent knitting and crochet revival shows that people want to have that special, one-of-a-kind piece and are ready to invest the time necessary to create it. Easily accessible patterns for small pieces to try out new things might help that process along in other techniques, too.
Blog at WordPress.com. | Theme: Pool by Borja Fernandez.
Entries and comments feeds.
