Hi
>>The purse is, indeed, beautiful (if highly impractical <g>). But can anyone
>>tell me what kind of lace it is? And how it's made?
It is Bebilla, a needle lace. Also known as Oya, Arab, Smyrna, Armenian ans
maybe other names as well.
I'm not being a smartie! I just happen to have got some these kinds of lace
to identify and catalogue and have borrowed a book from the Preston Lacemakers
library called 'Armenian Needle lace and Embroidery' by Alice Odian Kasparian.
A lady from Angora who settled in the US. This book was published in 1983 by
EPM Publications, ISBN 0-014440-65-9. It won't still be in print after all
this time, but no doubt it will be in Guild libraries. So far I have only
skimmed through the book but there are pictures showing how to hold the work
and do the various stitches. I have read in one or two books that this is
the oldest type of lace and was introduced into Europe from Asia Minor.
I have been examining some of the lace trying to work out how it was made. I
thought some may have been netting, but it isn't.
I can remember hearing that one of the workshops in Athens was Bebilla.
Alice Odian Kasparian sounds a fascinating person. Her father was a
manufacturer of fine textiles, her mother a lacemaker. They escaped the Turks
in 1915-16 and settled in Boston. She qualified as a pharmacist and became
chief pharmacist and reorganised pharmacies in some major hospitals. She
wrote three books, was president of the Armenian Studies & Research Association
and other organisations, and her needlelace was exhibited in St Vartan
Cathedral, New York, Harvard University & City Hall and the Fine Arts Museum,
Boston.
Regards
Dianne Derbyshire
in a cold, sunny Preston (England's 50th City)
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