Skip to main content

Calling all lace experts

I am making a tallit for a woman who inherited some beautiful linens from her Leeds born grandmother. Given that my apartment is the place where old linens go to live out their later years, I have seen lots of doilies over the years.

SAM_5519

What I find intriguing  about these doilies is how they are created with two layers of interconnected work.

SAM_5521

This is clearly high level, high quality work.

SAM_5520

I love those jonquil borders.

I am guessing that this is a form of bobbin lace, but I am happy to be corrected. I also know that various lace types were carefully classified in the golden age of lace making. unfortunately that knowledge is lost to me.

 

So do any of you have a sense of what this style of work is called, and secondly, any sense of when this work might have been made?SAM_5523

Both have discolored over the years and are now in their spa bath, hot water and Oxy-Clean.

SAM_5525

There are more vintage goodies that will be incorporated into this tallit.  I will share more as time goes on.

Labels:

Comments

  1. AnonymousNovember 6, 2015 at 3:20 PM

    Hi Sarah, I recently met some Lace people when I did a talk about my garments at their yearly gathering.
    There is a local group, so I will ask the organiser to have a look here and see if she knows, or if she can send someone else to have a look.
    They look amazing though! A lot of hard work!
    Sandy

    ReplyDelete
  2. Sarah JacobsNovember 6, 2015 at 3:36 PM

    Thanks.. There are some crochet elements but then is that needle lace on top?? There is such a great sculptural/dimensional quality to the lace.. I knew someone in my universe would know!!!

    ReplyDelete
  3. AnonymousNovember 7, 2015 at 3:49 PM

    Hi Sarah,
    The lady I asked says, "This looks to me like Crocheted Lace
    There is a lot of Irish crochet and it is similar to this."
    But she is also going to ask someone else who knows more about it.
    I think the Irish Crochet lace is a bit of crochet and a bit of needle lace together. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_lace Wikipedia says it is based on the detached buttonhole stitch.
    Sandy

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

I love hearing from my readers. I moderate comments to weed out bots.It may take a little while for your comment to appear.

Popular posts from this blog

מְחַיֵּה הַמֵּתִים

  וְנֶאֱמָן אַתָּה לְהַחֲיוֹת מֵתִים: בָּרוּךְ אַתָּה יְהֹוָה מְחַיֵּה הַמֵּתִים   You are faithful to restore the dead to life. Blessed are You, Adonoy, Resurrector of the dead. That particular line is recited at every single prayer service every day three times a day, unless you use a Reform or Reconstructionist prayer book . In those liturgies instead of praising God for resurrecting the dead God is praised for  giving life to all.  I am enough of a modern woman, a modern thinker, to not actually believe in the actual resurrection of the dead. I don't actually expect all of the residents of the Workmen's Circle section of  Mount Hebron cemetery in Queens to get up and get back to work at their sewing machines. I don't expect the young children buried here or  the babies buried here to one day get up and frolic. Yet, every single time I get up to lead services I say those words about the reanimating of the dead with every fiber of my being. Yesterday, I e...
2 comments
Read more

Connecting with the past

A few months ago I had a craving for my father’s chicken fricassee.  If my father were still alive I would have called him up and he would have talked me through the process of making it.    My father is no longer alive so I turned to my cookbooks and the recipes I found for chicken fricassee were nothing at all like the stew of chicken necks, gizzards and wings in a watery sweet and sour tomato sauce that I enjoyed as a kid.  I assumed that the dish was an invention of my father’s. I then attempted to replicate the dish from my memory of it and failed.   A couple of weeks ago I saw an article on the internet, and I can’t remember where, that talked about Jewish fricassee  and it sounded an awful lot like the dish I was hankering after. This afternoon I went to the butcher and picked up all of the chicken elements of the dish, a couple of packages each of wings, necks and gizzards. My father never cooked directly from a cook book. He used to re...
3 comments
Read more

Food friday - your grandmother's food processor

My grandmother bought my mother this wooden bowl and a chopping knife, known in Yiddish as a hock-messer, soon after my parents got married. Yes, she also got them a dairy set as well. these wooden bowls and chopping knives were a big part of food prep when I was growing up. meatloaf and meat balls were mixed in this bowl. Chopped liver was made in this bowl as well. Sundays we often made chicken salad for lunch made out of chicken left over from Shabbat chopped with vegetables and mayo. That too, was made in this bowl. When I was in college my parents got their first food processor and the chopping bowls were not used as much. Several years ago, my father asked if i would like the bowls and the hock-messers. I was happy to have them. I like the sheer physicality of chopping up a big bowl of stuff into teeny pieces. While the wooden bowls have stood up well to the years of use, the hock-messers had not. The bladed which were bolted into their handles, wobbled. The blades wouldn't ...
9 comments
Read more