Women in the west also made lace for their own clothing and family
clothes. Knitted and crocheted lace were especially popular in many of
the territories. In "The Long Winter", Laura Ingalls Wilder writes of
spending many hours knitting a cotton lace edging which she ends up
gifting to her blind sister to use to trim a petticoat. During that
winter, she was maybe 13-14 years old, I think. I saw knitted lace in
several of the regional museums I visited on a vacation trip to the
areas she lived in during her childhood (Iowa, Minnesota, S. Dakota,
Missouri).
Her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, wrote a novel based on the same time
period (circa 1870s) about a homesteading wife who spent an entire
winter alone with her baby and literally nothing to do until spring. (O
Pioneer, I think) She wrote of the woman crocheting (I'm writing this
from memory, it might have been knitting) an entire spool of cotton
thread into lace, and then unraveling it so that she could work it up
again, because she had nothing else to occupy the endless winter hours
in her homestead shanty. Boy does that paint a picture! I can imagine
that immigrant women who brought bobbin lace skills with them to America
might have spent winter months making lace for their own use.
Rose Wilder Lane also wrote the Woman's Day Book of American Needlework,
a book I have enjoyed since childhood. There are examples of both
crocheted and knitted lace in it.
In my home state, Texas, I think that crocheted and tatted lace were
more common. I don't remember seeing any knitted lace until I was an
adult, and had long left Texas. My Dad's mother used to tell the story
that she had once tatted an antimacassar and proudly displayed it on the
back of an easy chair. Her very crafty sister came over and after the
briefest of glances from across the room, stated badly, "You made a
mistake, there!" That was the last tatting my grandmother ever did, and
in fact, I never saw her do anything requiring more dexterity than
shuffling and dealing cards for her bridge games. My mother's mother,
on the other hand, crocheted several fabulous cotton bedspreads during
her lifetime. I can remember many family discussions over who would be
lucky enough to inherit them.
Lisa McClure
Alex Stillwell wrote:
Yes, members of my guild demo at local historic sites even though lace was not
a normal activity of the early settlers. I live in the far west of the USA
and modern history only started in the 1840's in this country. It was settled
by people who walked across the USA and carried all their possessions in a
wagon. Some of the diaries of the settlers mentioned that a woman might carry
a crochet hook or a tatting shuttle in her pocket clear across the country
because nothing frivolous was allowed in the wagon. Bobbin lace equipment
would not have been included, even if the lady knew how to do it.
The settlers may not have been able to take their bobbin lace equipment in the
wagons, but after they became settled they could have made the equipment.
Pillows are easy to make and bobbins can be whittled, parchments are prepared
from skin and thread and pins would have been available. The limiting factor
would have been the demand for lace in the area - at that time lace was not
made for enjoyment but as a source of income. If there was a demand and if it
was sufficiently lucrative it could have been a way of earning extra money.
However, there would probably be some evidence of this in the form of
advertisements, possibly in newspapers, even in dressmakers adverts. Has
anyone seen one?
Alex
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