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.
Point d’Angleterre, so named because of its great popularity in England, reached its height in beauty and in favor during the seventeenth century, when it occupied the talent and energy of all the lace-workers of Brussels. It differs from Needle Point, in which both flowers and mesh are made with the needle. It is one of the loveliest of all laces, combining in rare beauty, rich bouquets and arabesques and birds of finest bobbin work, with a frail transparent needle mesh, the flowers themselves becoming frequently more light and delicate through the introduction of charmingly varied needle-worked open spaces. Certain workers make the flowers, and others the connecting mesh. If one can imagine the softness of a kind of sublimated or diaphanous velvet, added to the fragility of an airy and cobwebby lace, one may have some idea of the effect of good Point d’Angleterre. And if one would possess a collar or a flounce, one should buy it quickly, for Point d’Angleterre is going the way of the other difficult and exquisite points. Such villages as Kerxken, Liedekerke, Destelbergen (near Ghent), and those of the Alost region still make occasional pieces.
BOBBIN LACES
(1) Malines (2) Application, flowers sewn on tulle
(3) Duchesse, with needle-point insertions