I would like to suggest that it is William Felkin's book, A history of the machine-wrought hosiery and lace manufactures that Jane is referencing. It is written in a very amusing style in 1867. I am quite interested in the example of lace that Alex posted on her site that is part handmade and part machine with embroidery. We were just looking at a piece in the museum, 08.180.260 https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search#!?q=08.180.260&perPage=20&sortBy=Relevance&sortOrder=asc&offset=0&pageSize=0 Elena, who was interning with us then, pointed out that it was machine made! What was interesting was that there were two parts to it, like the piece on Alex's blog. there was a larger area of a machine mesh which look sort of like cat stitch, and then a border of a finer machine mesh which is exactly like point ground. (Recognizing point ground made by machine is something I would like to learn how to do, since the thread movements are often identical, I don't know how to figure this out.) The surprise to me was that they were making two different meshes on the machine, then embrodering them. For some reason, I had assumed that we went from a plain tulle to the ability to do flowers, without gimp, and then finally to flowers with gimp. The concept that they were setting up the machines to do two adjacent different grounds and then handing them off to the hand embroiderers was news to me. Then, I looked at the Felkin book and saw something similar on Plate XII.Then I remembered that we had seen something similar in a salt print by the famous photographer Henry Fox Talbot. He had made a photo of a piece of lace in 1845 Here is a link https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/289186?sortBy=Relevance&ft=Henry+Fox+Talbot+lace&offset=0&rpp=20&pos=1 In fact I saw something similar in another Henry Fox Talbot salt print book up at Yale, but didn't get a photo of it. It is possible that Henry Fox Talbot was taking a photo of a piece of lace that was made far in the past, since presumably he didn't care what era the lace was. But, I asked Gunnel what she thought the date on the piece was and she said 1830s. I always think of the big blondes as being 1830s, so I guess i need to go back and look at the smaller borders of that era .Are they typically characterized by two different meshes side by side? Seeing Alex's piece where they attached a strip of the handmade to the embroidered mesh is very interesting. It is clearly a period of intense experimentation. Yes, it was quite likely the same people transitioning from hand lacemaking to embroidering net. Devon PS. I think it was the Napoleonic Wars, not the French Revolution that was the instigation for expelling English lace workers from France.
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