Dear Lorelei et al,
My children come from engineering families, on both sides, except that
before they were engineers, my father's family were landowning farmers. My
mother's family were poor peasants, but did not make lace. But I can
identify with the hand lacemakers. Making yardage lets you see what their
life was like, especially, I suspect, if you've got a deadline. It's as
close as most of us wants to get to what it was like.
I am fascinated by handmade lace. One can look at it from many angles, all
of them interesting. Simply making, solving the concomitant problems,
looking at the spread of lacemaking, how it was influenced by history.
Looking at the different kinds or styles of lace. Looking at lacemakers
through the ages. How style evolved, influencing lace. How the length of
men's hair influenced the lace they wore.
On the other hand, I can't afford handmade lace, unless I make it myself, or
get a bargain in antique lace. So machine lace is also a part of my life.
So Kate's dress was also fascinating. Sew it onto net to make something
new. Ahah.
There are so many facets to lace.
Lyn in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, USA, where we do not have drought, and it's
going to be cooler than it has been in a while. High's around 86F 27C or
less.
Lorelei wrote:
I have been thinking about this issue of machine-made versus hand-made for a
long time, and this seems like an appropriate time to address the issue.
I think that the essential difference between machine made lace and handmade
lace is that there are two entirely different groups of people to admire.
That is the essential difference to me.
In machine made lace one admires the engineers who figured out how to design
the machines, who tested their performance with threads available at the
time,
to see which ones had the strength to tolerate the machine's action. There
are the lace designers to admire, who had to understand how the machine
worked
so they could invent designs that the machine could actually make. But they
also had to understand what potential customers wanted, and create designs
that would sell.
In hand made lace the people to admire are entirely different. The lace
makers themselves were often illiterate women living without any real
security, just a few steps away from starvation. That was the condition of
working people then -- a very hard life. But these women had understood how
to make the lace and developed very great skill in their hands. And of
course
the lace designers are also to admire. They had to create designs that the
local women would know how to execute, or that could be taught relatively
quickly. And they had to understand the market and created designs that
would
sell.
My focus has always been on the lace makers themselves. Engineers in
general
are admirable people. But the lace makers and the designers who invented
the
designs, keeping up with fashion, and figuring out new ways, new techniques:
these latter ones are the ones that really amaze me. Machine made lace is a
commercial product, like machine spun thread, like machine woven cloth. But
hand made lace contains within it hundreds, thousands of individual
decisions,
individual choices. When I admire a piece of really old lace, I'm in
contact
with another human mind.
Lorelei
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