Ciarnait ni'Bhroin

Challenges Entered: Lace Challenge, Documentation Challenge, Plan your Project

Projects: Bobbin Lace

Venetian Bobbin Lace - creating the lace

The Lace Challenge I am doing is to recreate at least 1 of the bookmarks I made for Birka gift baskets in A.S. LIV with materials that are new to me. The originals were made in white linen with pattern A on page 3 of Le Pompe, 1559 Patterns for Venetian bobbin lace1 (Figure 1). For variety in the gifts, I altered where the picos were placed in various ways. This project copies the first bookmark, which is the closest to an exact copy of the book pattern that I made (Figure 2). It is my interpretation of the pattern book that they are showing different options for placement of the picos, so some of the squares have picos and some do not. The one change I made to the pattern was to add the picos in the end square as it made the piece look more balanced in my eyes. For That project I needed a dozen bookmarks and made 3 versions of pico placements, with 2 different tasseled ends. There was not a perfect duplicate of any bookmark and they were gifted in matched sets.

Full documentation & photos focusing on lacemaking at https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Mr0P2ggR1450UVeoodKHB9TH_tK7yWCM/view?usp=sharing

For more photos and documentation on how the project was planned, see https://drive.google.com/file/d/1YTea4GyaQUJNlLYWhkIXsKZT2ShhA2a4/view?usp=sharing

Sicilian Bobbin lace

I once went to a class about the colorful Bobbin Lace on the “Sicilian Wedding Trousseau” at Pennsic. I have wanted to duplicate that lace for a long time. At the time, the documentation was not allowed by the Metropolitan Museum of New York (the MET) to be reproduced or shared. This led to the problem of actually finding documentation for those pieces at the MET. Now things are a bit different, and the MET has opened viewing of many of its images.

These pieces were very troublesome to find as they had at least 1 name change since I started looking for them. I was eventually able to locate them by searching for “Costume Metal”. The current names for them are extremely generic “Smock”1, “Trousers” (there are 2 of these with the same name), and “Stockings”2. The lace on the stockings matches the lace on the trousers with green and peach silk plus gold and silver metal thread3. The lace on the trousers done in gold, silver and brown4 is slightly different.

The Smock uses a particular types of lace which I plan to work out how to make. What draws me to this style are the silk and metal arches that have only metal picos. Because of the ever-changing location of threads, it will be a challenge to duplicate this lace. The rest of the pieces have separate plaits of either metal thread or silk that intertwine.

There are at least a ½ dozen different ways to make picos that I know of. Gilian Dye describes how to make the most simple picos possible in Introducing Bone Lace, A Beginner’s Guide to Working Early Bobbin Lace, on page 175. They are formed by simply using a pin to hold the thread out in an extra-large loop away from the rest of the braid and are ideal for wire made lace. Rosemary Shepherd uses twisted loops of 2 threads for the vast majority of the picos in her book An Early Lace Workbook, Bobbin Lace Techniques before the Baroque, first shown on page 376, and described in her book Introduction to Bobbin Lacemaking on page 297.

Looking closely at the picos neither of these styles match what is shown in the Smock, though they both appear in the Trousers with brown silk8. The Smock uses a single loop pico in which 1 thread is looped around an extra-large pin in an underhand twist and then worked back into the braid.

References Cited

Smock, [stamp] "Donne San Teodoro". Late 16th century. The Metropolitan Museum of New York, THE MET, https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/83861, image 3.

Stockings, [stamp] "Donne San Teodoro". 16th century. The Metropolitan Museum of New York, THE MET, https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/83871.

Trousers[stamp] "Donne San Teodoro". 16th century. The Metropolitan Museum of New York, THE MET, https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/83868.

Trousers[stamp] "Donne San Teodoro". 16th century. The Metropolitan Museum of New York, THE MET, https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/83869.

Dye, Gilian. Introducing Bone Lace, A Beginner’s Guide to Working Early Bobbin Lace, Page 17. Glasgow: Cleveden Press. 2017.

Shepherd, Rosemary. An Early Lace Workbook, Bobbin Lace Techniques before the Baroque, Page 39. Berkeley, CA: LACIS Publications. 2009.

Shepherd, Rosemary. Introduction to Bobbin Lacemaking. Berkeley, CA: LACIS Publications. 1995.

Trousers[stamp] "Donne San Teodoro". 16th century. The Metropolitan Museum of New York, THE MET, https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/83869, image 4.