It is generally accepted that Bedfordshire lace developed somewhere around 1851-1852 in the wake of the Great Exhibition of 1851 at Crystal Palace, where Maltese lace was exhibited. The machine industry had taken much of the trade away from the East Midland lacemakers, so the designers like Thomas Lester were looking for ideas that the machines could not easily copy, and were quicker to produce than the labour intensive Buckinghamshire Point that had been made in those areas up until then (Bedfordshire, Northamptonshire and Buckinghamshire are adjoining counties where point laces were made). If you compare the laces, you will see that Bedfordshire is very similar to Cluny and Maltese, but has the 'raised' look of Honiton, due to the method used for taking pairs in and out of trails. Although called Bedfordshire, it was made in the neighbouring counties; I have a Beds collar made in the Buckinghamshire town of Olney in 1910 (given to me by the son of the lacemaker who made it).
The design aspect of Bedfordshire followed the general design fashions of the time, across many different media - if you look at the architecture of the late 19th century you will see similarities between wrought and cast ironwork and the lace designs. This is because design then did follow through as a 'common core', similar to the design work we did for City and Guilds (lacemakers doing the same elements of design in their course as embroiderers, florists, upholsterers, etc) whereas in the 20th century design generally moved away from the idea that designs and patterns used in architecture could be followed through to textiles around the home (which earlier architects, eg Voysey and Morris, would have designed as well as the house itself). This dawned on me after a Lace Guild Convention when I was sat on Bristol Temple Meads railway station waiting for a train home, looking at the ironwork and wondering which came first - and later using the question as the basis for my design research - both I discovered were contemporary; borne out even further when I discovered rather a rather charming ray of Bedfordshire leaf tallies in the iron canopy support at Nuneaton Railway Station (Platforms 4 and 5). Torchon lace was also fairly late coming to England, as again it was fairly quick to make so could compete against the machine industry - it likewise is attributed to the 19th century here, but was made much earlier on the continent. Jane Partridge - To unsubscribe send email to majord...@arachne.com containing the line: unsubscribe lace y...@address.here. For help, write to arachne.modera...@gmail.com. Photo site: http://www.flickr.com/photos/lacemaker/sets/
