Some excellent work, equal if not superior to some of the best Flemish tapestry, has been successfully made by William Morris from the designs of Sir Edward Burne-Jones.
England has given great attention to the manufacture of low warp carpets, in which she is only excelled by some of the best products of Oriental looms. The manufacture of printed and woven carpets now forms one of the most important factors in the national prosperity of England. Brussels carpets are now made chiefly at Kidderminster; originally they were made at Wilton. Axminster and Kidderminster carpets are made in Glasgow, Wilton, and Kilmarnock, and Wilton carpets in Yorkshire.
Turkey carpets are imported chiefly from Smyrna. Persia, India, and Tunis are still great centres of the Eastern carpet industry. The carpets from these places are in great request in Europe for their beauty of colour and design and for their great wearing qualities.
Carpets were originally used as portières, table and couch coverings, but have gradually become coverings for floors, owing to their cheapened cost of production.
Lace.
Hand-made laces are divided into two great classes—the “needle-point” and the “pillow-made”; the former is made with a needle on parchment, and the latter by twisting or plaiting threads from bobbins on a pillow.
Needle-point lace is an offspring of embroidery, and pillow-made lace is the highest artistic development of twisted and plaited threads. The foundation lines or threads of the pattern, various kinds of grounds, and the edging in needle-point lace, are usually worked over with a button-hole stitch in the ordinary course of making, while this distinguishing feature of needle-point lace is absent in the pillow-made varieties.
The earliest forms of lace were known as “lacis,” or darned netting, and a species of embroidery called “cutwork.” One kind of cutwork consisted in cutting, vandyking, or scalloping the edges of collars, cuffs, or garments into various shapes, and overcasting the edges with the button-hole stitch; another kind was when an embroidered design was wrought on stretched network, and the pattern wrought in looped stitches with the needle. This was the transitional form between embroidery and lace work.
“Lacis,” or darned netting, was worked in regulated stitches on a ground formed in squares, called “reseuil,” and sometimes it was formed of pieces of linen cut out and applied to the net. Ornamental open-work of cut linen and other material embroidered with silks of various colours, gold and silver threads, and woollen yarns, were made before the sixteenth century. All these varieties, though akin to lace work, required some kind of a foundation, but lace consists of a combination of threads alone, and has no foundation.
Pattern-books were published in Venice of designs for “cutworks” and embroidery of all kinds as early as 1527, and later, in 1531, a book was published by Tagliente, giving the descriptions and methods employed for making the various stitches used in embroidery for hangings, costumes, and altar-cloths. Some of the geometric designs in this book have been used for point-lace patterns. The term used by the Italians, punto in aere (aria), or “point in air,” is thought by Mr. Alan Cole to mean needle-point lace. The geometric design (Fig. 276) of Genoese point is something very much akin to the punto in aria patterns.