Under the impulse of fashion and luxury, lace has received the stamp of the special style of each country. Italy furnishes its Point of Venice; Belgium its Brussels and Mechlin; France its Valenciennes, etc.
Very little is known of the early lace manufacturers of Holland. The laces of Holland were overshadowed by the richer products of their Flemish neighbors. The Dutch, however, had one advantage over other nations in their Haarlem thread, once considered the best thread in the world for lace.
In Switzerland, the center of the lace trade, the work was carried on to such a degree of perfection as to rival the laces of Flanders, not alone in beauty, but also in quality.
Attempts have been made at various times, both during this century and the last, to assist the peasantry of Ireland by instruction in lace-making. The finest patterns of old lace were procured, and the Irish girls showed great skill in copying them. Later a better style of work, needlepoint, was modeled after old Venetian lace—the exquisite productions for which Americans pay fabulous prices at the present day.
The lace manufacturers of Europe experienced a serious set-back in 1818 when bobbinet was first made in France. Fashion, always fleeting, adopted the new material. Manufacturers were forced to lower prices, but happily a new channel for export was opened in the United States.
The machine-made productions of the Nottingham looms, as triumphs of mechanical ingenuity, deserve great praise.
The first idea of the lace-making machine is attributed to a common factory hand, Hammond Lindy, who, when examining the lace on his wife’s cap, conceived a plan by which he could copy it on his loom. Improvements followed, and in 1810 a fairly good net was produced.
Perhaps the most delicate textile machine known, in its sensitiveness to heat and cold, is a lace machine. A machine can be made to run in any climate, provided it is so installed as to be protected from either extreme of temperature.
The various substitutes for hand-made lace are legion; for what the inventor cannot achieve in one way he can in another. There remains however the fact that the productions of machinery can never possess the charm of the real hand-made work. Machine-made lace is stiffer than hand-made lace.