“ARMS OF YPRES” CUSHION COVER IN VENISE, WITH DETAILS IN FLANDERS
And this was the most rewarding one I had yet visited. It happened that the majority of the pupils were busy on the details of a tablecloth recently designed by Madame Allard, in which the linen center is encircled by a family of little beasts as gay as any ever gathered together to cheer a dinner company. I laughed outright, as a little girl, herself laughing, held up an exquisitely worked and most vividly real group of happy ducks floating on a pond. The next showed her enchanting rabbits, another her deer—all along the line they were chuckling over the success of their particular pets. They had captured the sunshine and happy motion of a farm-yard world with just a needle and a single linen thread! Here, as at Erembodeghem, only linen thread is used, because tho it is more difficult to handle, it produces a finer and stronger lace than cotton. After several months (it took six months to execute the first cloth of this design) the details would be assembled and joined by special workers, following the large paper pattern the sisters were now spreading across a table, which had been sent down to Opbrakel from the room of design at Brussels. And the finished cloth, as delightful as an early naive tapestry with its smiling animals, would be sent to the Committee for sale.
Opbrakel stands unquestionably first in Belgium in the production of figures in Point de Venise. During the war, its workers have repeated several times for the Committee their beautiful “Fables de La Fontaine” series of medallions, as well as those which represent so charmingly “Little Red Riding-Hood,” “Puss in Boots,” “The Sleeping Beauty,” and other much loved fairy-tale figures. These medallions have been sold separately as doilies, or have been combined with Flanders lace or linen in handsome cloths.
It was fast growing dark, and the 125 girls began folding their patterns, and carefully wrapping their delicately pictured little rabbits and ducks to keep them clean till the morrow; maids appeared with dust-pans and brooms, and we gathered up our skirts and stept out into the courtyard. As we crossed it in the dark and the rain it was difficult to refuse the further hospitality of these sisters, who would have kept me for the night.
[IX]
LIEDEKERKE
The Last Lace Stronghold of Brabant
In the court in front of the big brick convent building with its odd little steeple, two sisters, skirts tucked up, and pails swung over their shoulders, Chinese fashion, were about to begin the Saturday scrubbing. Madame Kefer-Mali and I were on our way to Liedekerke, the principal remaining lace center in Brabant, and had stopt in this less important village of Heckelgem for a look at the convent school opened nine years ago.
In the village itself we had found about 150 of the 2,000 inhabitants busy with their needles, for this is distinctly a needle-lace commune, producing a fairly good quality of Venise. Which means that there are as yet no local mills, and tho an adjacent match factory has already attracted a number of Heckelgem girls, most of the women are still content to spend their time making Venise, which they take to the convent, to be sold there to Brussels or other agents.