Bobbins of Belgium: A book of Belgian lace, lace-workers, lace-schools and lace-villagesKellogg, Charlotte
History
Bobbins of Belgium: A book of Belgian lace, lace-workers, lace-schools and lace-villages
Kellogg, Charlotte
Brussels lace committee; Lace and lace making -- Belgium
One small room was undisturbed, but it was a sadder room than any of
the others. The primary lace-class had occupied it, and several rows of
little girls were learning to make their first flowers and leaves when
the enemy drove them out. The baby chairs and the cushions were just as
they left them, tho thick dust dulled the blue of the linen covers and
the tiny unfinished white roses and tendrils held by the rusty pins.
One would have liked to bring the enemy mothers into this room with its
baby chairs, and its dust-covered unfinished roses.
In the large adjoining hall Sister M. kindly came to work at a
table, on Application, one of the laces for which Liedekerke has been
especially distinguished. Before the English invention, early in 1800,
of machine-made tulle, which had an incalculable influence on the
development of the lace-industry, all meshes had to be made either with
the needle or with bobbins. The factory substitute for these difficult
processes won instant favor, and with the general public the more
swiftly made and cheaper tulle Application, supplanted the exquisite
Point d’Angleterre, which it imitated. Liedekerke, for example, had
begun its lace career with Point d’Angleterre, and in changing later to
Application, was merely responding to popular demand. Its sixty years
of lace-history reads: Point d’Angleterre, Application, Rosaline.
These things Madame Kefer-Mali explained, as Sister M. was placing
her square of blue paper on the linen of the table cushion, and then
the bobbin-made bouquet, wrong side up on the blue square, pinning it
carefully and smoothly through the paper to the cushion. Over this
she stretched her scarf length of tulle. I was surprized at the time
and painstaking effort she gave to these simple operations, until I
saw later the effect of the slightest carelessness on the finished
flounce. Almost any clever needlewoman can join a flower to a piece
of tulle—but only an artist can produce a beautiful scarf or veil in
Application. Once the bouquet was properly placed and pinned, Sister
M. began to sew, lifting the tulle lightly with each stitch, and
smoothly attaching all the edges, for this bouquet was being appliquéd
on the body of the scarf. Had it formed the border one edge would have
remained free.
Liedekerke Convent, to which some 200 of the villagers bring their
laces and which once made little else than Application (many beautiful
robes and flounces and scarfs have gone out from the commune and the
school), now makes comparatively little of it; for during the last
six years Paris and other markets have asked for Rosaline. It is to
be hoped that this small quantity may be continued, and that the lace
world may still win at least a few pieces yearly of the earlier, more
exquisite Point d’Angleterre.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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