On Dec 10, 2004, at 5:16, Jane Partridge wrote:
There are some pieces of my lace which I hope will be around, like my
great-great-grandmother's sampler, to show future generations what I did
- but I cannot control what my daughters do with them once I am gone -
and there is no guarantee that if they were given to a museum that a)
that institution would survive; b) they would ever see the light of day
again or c) they would not be sold/passed on to a less caring buyer.
On behalf of a... not a "collector", really, but someone (in her 70ties), whose grandmother went to Europe on her honeymoon and bought laces...which then resided, for over 50 yrs, next to the coal-powered heating system in the basement... and had been "rescued" and laundered (bleach was necessary, the laces being almost black, I was told), and starched, and ironed into a uniformly "grey afternoon in winter"...
On behalf of that person, I checked - 2-3 yrs ago - with a museum of her choice, about a possibility of giving it the collection or, at least, the best bits of it (there was a lot of decent machine-made stuff there, and some interesting hand-made bits). All *she* wanted, was a tax break. All the museum wanted, was a hefty cash donation on top of the lace donation :) And that wasn't a major museum like the Metropolitan.
IOW, you cannot give away lace to a museum these days, unless you're willing to provide the funds for the upkeep of the collection as well, or unless it's a substantial piece of 17th century lace with a provenance (other than "my grandma bought it in Europe, in the early 1900s). In extensio... Any piece of lace announced on E-bay as being of "museum quality" is, IMO, automatically *worhtless* :)
Lace by people like Suchanek and Woods and Loehr (and, since last night, I remembered two other names: Pat Perryman in Honiton and Catherine Barley in Needle Lace) ought to - and probably will - end up in museums for people to study 100 and more years hence. Contributions of many more to the history/reconstruction of traditional patterns (too many to begin listing, though Nottingham and Skovgaard stand high on my personal list) deserve to be remembered - and are likely to be, since all of them have published books.
But, the rest? You, me, and Jane Doe?
We all contribute to keeping the craft alive and evolving. We give our "products" to those who appreciate it, doubling our own pleasure. IOW, we all do the best we can. But, most of us aren't the Einsteins of lace :) And there's no shame attached to it, because we all *count*. It's only when we begin to think that each of us, personnally, is the belly-button of the world, that we begin to look a tad silly... :)
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Tamara P Duvall http://lorien.emufarm.org/~tpd
Lexington, Virginia, USA (Formerly of Warsaw, Poland)
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