Another kind was made entirely of thread, which was arranged on a frame in lines diverging from the centre like a spider’s web, and worked across and over with other threads, forming geometrical patterns. Later, a fabric still more like our modern lace was made. A groundwork was netted by making one stitch at the beginning, and increasing a stitch on each side till the requisite size was obtained. On this ground was worked the pattern, sometimes darned in with counted stitches, sometimes cut out of linen, and appliqué. Still another kind was drawn-work, threads being drawn from linen or muslin, and the thinned cloth worked into lace. Specimens still exist of a six-sided lace net made in this way, with sprigs worked over it.
The earlier rich laces were not made of white thread. Gold, silver, and silk were used. The Italians, who claim to have invented point lace, were the great makers of gold lace. Cyprus stretched gold into a wire, and wove it. From Cyprus the art reached Genoa, Venice, and Milan; and gradually all Europe learned to make gold lace. In England, the complaint was raised that the gold of the realm was sensibly diminishing in this way, and in 1635 an act was passed prohibiting the melting down of bullion to make gold or silver “purl.” And not only in Western and Southern Europe was this luxury fashionable. A piece of gold lace was found in a Scandinavian barrow opened in the XVIIIth century. Perhaps the lace was made by some captive woman stolen by the vikings, a later Proserpine ravished from the South, who wove the web with her pale fingers as she sat in that frozen Hades, while her piratical blue-eyed Pluto looked on marvelling, and waiting to catch a smile from her relenting eyes. Gold lace was sold by weight.
Some of the most magnificent old points of Venice were made of silk, the natural cream-color. The rose Venice point—Gros point de Venice, Punto a rilievo—was the richest and most complicated of all points. It was worked of silk, on a parchment pattern, the flowers connected by brides. The outlines of these flowers were in relief, cotton being placed inside to raise them, and countless beautiful stitches were introduced. Sometimes they were in double, sometimes in triple, relief, and each flower and leaf was edged with fine regular pearls. This point was highly prized for albs, collerettes, berthes, and costly decorations.
Another kind of Venice lace—knotted point—had a charmingly romantic origin. A young girl in one of the islands of the Lagune, a lace-worker, was betrothed to a young sailor, who brought her home from the Southern seas a bunch of pretty coralline called mermaid’s lace. Moved partly by love for the giver, and partly by admiration for the graceful nature of the seaweed, with its small white knots united by a bride, the girl tried to imitate it with her needle, and, after several unsuccessful efforts, produced a delicate guipure, which soon was admired all over Europe.
We must not, in this connection, forget that handkerchief given by Othello to Desdemona, the loss of which cost her so dear. It was wrought, he tells her, by an Egyptian sibyl, who
“In her prophetic fury sewed the work.”
And he declares that
“The worms were hallowed that did breed the silk.”
The flat points of Venice were no less exquisite than the raised, the patterns sometimes being human figures, animals, cupids, and flowers.
In the XVIth century, Barbara Uttmann invented pillow-net, a great advance in the making of lace. This lady’s father had moved from Nuremberg to the Hartz Mountains, to superintend mines there, and there the daughter married a rich master-miner, Christopher Uttmann, and lived with him in his castle of Annaberg. Seeing the mountain girls weave nets for the miners to wear over their hair, her inventive mind suggested a new and easier way of making fine netting. Her repeated failures we know not of, but we know of her success. In 1561 she set up a workshop in her own name, and this branch of industry spread so that soon 30,000 persons were employed, with a revenue of 1,000,000 thalers. In 1575, the inventress died and was laid to rest in the churchyard of Annaberg, where her tombstone records that she was the “benefactress of the Hartz Mountains.”