We live in a society where we are lucky enough to be able to purchase our clothes pretty much immediately from a wide range of shops selling an abundance of ready to wear apparel depending on the style and fashion we want to achieve. When our clothes have served there purpose we will pass them onto charity or recycle them. In years gone by it wasn’t so easy and to purchase new clothes you had to go to your tailor, be measured, choose your design and fabric and then wait for your new clothes to be made.

As a result we became very good at recycling, reusing and repurposing clothes. This is one reason why so little lace has survived today. Hand made lace was not cheap and was considered a status swymbol. You would make best use of what you had by moving it from article to article, and repurposing/reshaping it time and time again. This applies to both thread lace and metal lace. Because metal lace was made from precious and expensive metals such as gold and silver and an items usefulness had been served they were melted down and this beautiful work disappeared into the ether.

So how do we study these laces? Many lace researchers use old portraits which often have exquisite detail of laces in fashion at the time the portrait. Rosemary Shepherd’s book ‘An Early Lace Workbox’ is a great resource, Rosemary shares details of her travels around the world and the laces she has studied in museums and portraits to understand how early laces were made.

One of the samples in Rosemary’s book comes from one of Janet Arnold’s ‘Patterns of Fashion’ book. This is a diamond net reconstruction which was originally used to trim the bodice of a gown.

It is a lovely simple sample using picots and plaits to great effect. I have used this sample to create a wire lace pendant using early lace picots. Rosemary’s sample is also created using early lace picots.

My second wire pendant is the same pattern but with modern day picots and some beads added over the roseground.