1

Chapter 2. Lace
2.1 2.2 Introduction Difficulties in historical lace research
2.2.1 Defining lace 2.2.2 Artefactual and textual limitations 2.2.3 The similarity of types of lace

2.3

Historical styles and techniques

2.3.1 European lace 2.3.2 Irish lace 2.3.2.1 Background 2.3.2.2 New versions of traditional lace 2.3.2.3 Pre-1845 lace in nineteenth century Ireland

Chapter 3. British crochet to 1855

3.1 Origins
3.1.1 Nuns work 3.1.2 Shepherds knitting 3.1.3 Tambouring 3.1.4 Netting 3.1.5 Needlelace connection 3.1.6 Crossover in materials and patterns

3.2

Pattern books 1840 1855

Chapter 4. Irish Crochet to 1855

4.1 4.2 The research dates Parallels with British crochet
4.2.1 4.2.2 4.2.3 4.2.4 Knitting Tambouring Netting Needlelace

4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6 4.7 4.8 4.9

Origins of Irish crochet Pattern books in Ireland Sources of design Stylistic characteristics Mlle Riego de la Branchardire The collapse of the industry The worldwide legacy

Bibliography

Illustrations
Fig.2.a. Fig.2.b. Fig.2.c. Fig.2.d. Fig.2.e. Fig.2.f. Fig.2.g. Fig.2.h. Fig.2.i. Fig.2.j. Some distinctive lace types Earnshaws diagram - the interconnectivity of lace A lacis pattern Drawnthread work Worked lacis Filet crochet Venetian gros point Detail of Figure 2.g Irish Crochet version of reticella Machine/chemical lace

Fig.4.a. Fig.4.b. Fig.4.c. Fig.4.d. Fig.4.e. Fig.4.f. Fig.4.g. Fig.4.h. Fig.4.i. Fig.4.j. Fig.4.k. Fig.4.l. Fig.4.m. Fig.4.n. Fig.4.o. Fig.4.p. Fig.4.q. Fig.4.r.

Lacemaking areas in Ireland 1853 collar from Ballingarry 1854 lappets Coraline lace Cuff showing possible coraline influence Mechlin lace Irish Crochet coat from 1912 pattern 1855 collar from Killeshandra, County Cavan 1855 Killeshandra collar Spanish version of Venetian style Detail of Clones lace collar Riego parasol design Section of Riego collar Section of instructions for making Riego collar Riego design from The Needle, 1853 Section from hybrid crochet collar Riego collar, 1847, Point dEspagne Riegos 1855 Spanish Point Lace

Abbreviations NMI - National Museum of Ireland UFTM - Ulster Folk and Transport Museum V&A - Victoria and Albert Museum

Chapter 2. Lace
Alenon. Antwerp. Appenzell. Argentan. Argentella. Armenian. Arras. Aurillac. Ayrshire. Bailleul. Barmen. Battenburg. Bayeux. Bebilla.

Bedfordshire. Beveren. Binche. Bisette. Bloemwerk. Blonde. Bohemian. Borris. Brabant. Branscombe. Broderie Anglaise. Broomstick. Brussels. Bruges. Bucks Point. Bunt. Burano. Buratto. Burgandy. Caen. Carnival. Carrickmacross. Chantilly. Chemical. Chrysanthemum. Clones. Cluny.

Coggeshall. Cogne. Coraline. Cork. Croatian. Curragh. Cutwork. Dentelle la Reine. Downton. Dresden. Duchesse. Dutch Beveren. Edelweiss. Filet. Filet Crochet. Flanders. Flemish. Geneva. Genoese. Greek. Gros Point de Venise. Hairpin. Halas. Hamburg. Hamilton. Hardanger. Hedebo. Hollie Point. Honiton. Horsehair. Hungarian. Idrijan. Inishmacsaint. Irish Crochet. Kells. Kenmare. Lacis. Liege. Le Puy. Leavers. Lille. Limerick. Luxeuil. Machine. Madeira. Malmesbury. Maltese. Mechlin. Metal. Mignonette. Milanese. Miracourt. Nanduti. Net. Normandy. Nottingham. Orris. Oya. Plat point. Point d'Angleterre. Point de France. Point de Gaze. Point de Neige. Point de Paris. Polka Spider Web. Polychrome. Potten Kant. Princess. Puncetto Valsesiano. Punto in Aria. Punto a Groppo. Pusher. Renaissance. Reticella. Rhodes. Ripon. Rococo. Romanian Point. Rosaline. Roseground. Rosepoint. Roslea. Russian. Saxony. Sedan. Schneeberg. Sherborne. Shetland. Slovenia. Skansk. Spanish. Swedish. Swiss. Tambour. Tape. Tatting. Tenerife. Tignes. Tonder. Torchon. Trolle Kant. Trolly. Valenciennes. Vandyke. Venetian. Vieux Flandre. War. Wire. Withof. Yak. Youghal. Ypres. Fig. 2.a. Some distinctive lace types
The majority of laces belong to one of four groups: - depending on whether their roots are in embroidery or weaving. Almost all the types of lace listed in Figure 2.a can be classified as being [a] needlelace, [b] bobbin lace, [c] a hybrid of needlelace and bobbin lace or [d] a variation of [a], [b], or [c]. Few are stylistically unique. Most attempt to be an exact copy of a pre-existing lace or, by changing tools, techniques or materials, a variation of a known lace. Irish laces are emboldened in the list. Their sources are easily traceable because, following tradition, they are copies or versions of identifiable European laces. Irish Crochet Clones, Cork and Roslea in the list is Irelands most stylistically distinctive lace.

2.1

Introduction

During the 1840s the newly fashionable craft of crochet acquired multiple manifestations depending on which of its connections to knitting, netting, tambouring or needlelace was emphasised. In Ireland, initially, two crochet styles developed, from different sources. The needlelace origins of the crochet that was first made in County Kildare are traced in this chapter. Chapter 3 details the possible sources of the crochet that was made around Cork.

Crochet stitch, if made independently or on a backing fabric, is a chain stitch. If made over cord, the stitch is indistinguishable from a buttonhole stitch. Needlelace is multiple repetitions of buttonhole stitch over a variable number of strands of fine cord for motif outlines, and buttonhole stitch variants for motif fillings. This means that all historical needlelaces worked over cord can be used as design sources for crocheted versions of needlelaces. Parts crocheted over cord can look the same as needlelace: only non cordcovering parts (fillings, ground and edging) look different, since they are hooked chain stitches, rather than needle-made buttonhole stitch variants.

The cyclical nature of fashions in lace means that similar styles are reproduced decades, and sometimes centuries, apart. Laces created using new techniques are additions to the catalogue, not replacements: so that, when punto in aria (Italian: stitch in air) developed from reticella (Italian: net) for example, both were made subsequently, rather than the most recentlymade superseding its predecessor. In the mid nineteenth century, it was fashionable, among those who could afford what was still a luxury purchase, to wear antique lace from many periods and places (sometimes all together); from the many varieties and variations of Venetian needlepoints to gossamer-like Chantilly.

The interconnectivity of all lace types.

Fig.2.b. Earnshaws (1983, p.5) diagram of lace relationships illustrates a reason for it being so difficult to define lace: the majority of laces are hybrids rather than one, self-contained, technique: the diversity of lace types cannot be encompassed in a succinct definition. Additions to the original show the sources of Kilcullen lace (Chapter 2) and Cork lace (Chapter 3). Irish Crochet (Chapter 4) is a hybrid of lace from the two areas.

2.2

Difficulties in historical lace research

2.2.2 Artefactual and textual limitations Unfortunately, the history of textiles will remain incomplete because most cloth has been lost. Compared with other forms of material culture, precious metals and ceramics, for example, fabrics are fragile. Because textiles are perishable, long-term survival has depended on exceptional storage conditions. Immeasurable quantities of precious textiles were cut up in the

Middle Ages to recover precious stones, or burned to salvage gold and silver. Quality fabrics and costly garments were discarded or reshaped as fashion and figures changed, but most simply experienced a natural life cycle of wear and laundering that demotes textiles over time from best to everyday to rag.

Prior to the nineteenth century, trade and sumptuary restrictions, expensive threads1, and a labour-intensive manufacturing process made lace exorbitantly expensive. Paradoxically, the immense value of lace contributed to its destruction. In 1764, for example, to protect British manufacture, forty five kilos of smuggled French lace - then valued at hundreds of thousands of pounds and representing millions of hours of labour - was burned. Throughout Europe, for centuries, the dead were customarily buried in their most precious clothes which, for those who could afford it, included lace; some of which can still be seen as carving on effigies. Tombs were raided in the mid eighteen hundreds when there was a mania for antique lace. A late seventeenth century publication regrets the terrible waste of precious handknitted silk stockings and Venetian lace cravats that could not be recovered from soldiers killed in battle.

Most nineteenth century lace no longer exists, not because of its great worth but because of its relative cheapness. Since machines became able to reproduce expensive handmade lace so successfully only an expert could differentiate between some types, much valuable lace has been discarded or cut up and reused because its worth has not been recognised.

Relatively few examples of Irish lace have survived for the above reasons, but additionally:

A notion of the extreme delicacy of the thread used in the manufacture of Brussels lace may be formed from the fact that a pound of such thread sometimes costs 160, and that, with all the extra care bestowed upon it, it is even then not sufficiently refined for entire use, but that nearly one-half of the costly article is wasted. The extreme of this fine quality is the production of thread which cannot be worked when the wind is in the north, or the slightest breath of air moves, from its extraordinary tenuity. Linen thread thus obtained is worth more than six times its weight in pure gold: affording a striking exemplification of the manner in th which labour imparts value to raw material. The Illustrated Exhibitor, (18), 4 October 1851, p.333.

Because the outlining gimp is insecurely attached, Carrickmacross lace often disintegrated when inexpertly laundered.

Comparatively little was made of some types of lace: Inishmacsaint needlelace and Borris tape lace, for example.

Almost all Irish lace was made for export. Englishwomen often purchased Irish lace for charitable reasons, yet Irish women who could afford handmade lace bought it from France, Italy or Belgium: just 5% of Cork lace was sold locally.

Textual evidence is limited. A lot of lace history and social context can be gleaned from pattern books but, unlike England and Scotland, no pattern books were published in Ireland in the nineteenth century.

2.2.3 The similarity of types of lace Until the widespread distribution of printed manuals from the 1840s, there were just two major ways of learning to make lace: either to be taught by an experienced maker or to examine finished lace, unpick stitches, and tacitly work out the process by which it was made. When the survival of families and whole communities depended on selling lace as a commodity, the secrets involved in its making were jealously guarded, locally and nationally.

The reluctance of individuals and groups to share skills with outsiders led to the tradition of deconstructing complicated lace in an attempt to work out its structure. In Ireland, Mother Mary Ann Smith unravelled the threads of antique Milanese lace to understand how it had been made before reconstructing it into what became known as Youghal lace. In nearby Kenmare, Mother Augustine Dalton used the same method before remaking a rose point. Makers have been known to hide their work when someone

approaches or to send work to buyers via a distant post office to avoid the risk of a local person seeing and plagiarising a family-owned motif.

Before the manufacture of machine net and the development of crochet, the inclination to copy was based on the principle that only the best quality lace was worth the difficulty of deconstruction and reproduction. The invention of a bobbinet machine in the early 1800s changed the objective of lacemakers which, until then, had been to produce a lace that looked exactly like a valuable, pre-existing one. Often the highest praise a critic could give was that the copy was indistinguishable from its source. In fact, most attempted copies differed and became variations of originals. Manufactured net,

because it did not reproduce the irregularity of handmade net grounds, could not mimic handmade lace and any lace that incorporated bobbinet, including Limerick and varieties of Carrickmacross, Brussels and Honiton, never claimed to be exact copies, but versions, of pre-existing laces. The same is true of most crochet: because it is made with a hook it cannot exactly copy named laces but often attempts to be a hooked version of different styles of lace. Of the many crochet versions of lace, Irish point came closest to reproducing a valuable, pre-existing lace.

When the reproduced lace matched the original in quality, retaining the originals name conferred cachet. Mechlin, for example, was made in Belgium, Spain and Italy, and Lille lace was made throughout Europe: when made in the English Midlands, it was English Lille. Sometimes the place where the copy was made was added to the originals name to distinguish it from other copies: Belgian Chantilly and Chantilly of Bayeux for example. When copied lace changed over time and became good enough not to need the association with the source, it adopted its own place name. If machine made, however, the place of manufacture was not usually included in the name. Except for a relatively short period in the early second half of the nineteenth century, machine made lace has been ranked as less desirable than handmade work and has tended to gloss over its actual place of manufacture; except, perhaps, for Nottingham where the place name is synonymous with machine lace.

10

Because Limerick lace production was a large scale commercial enterprise, it became Limerick lace almost immediately even though it began by copying Coggeshall lace. The same was not true for crochet made in Ireland. Until the end of the nineteenth century, the work was called by its style; plain, Greek, Spanish, Jesuit, knotted, lifted, guipure, Venetian point and Irish point. When copied in France in the early twentieth century, the style was point dIrlande. The name Irish Crochet has been used by publishers of patterns and manufacturers since the early twentieth century. Among makers in Ireland, it has always been, simply, the crochet.

2.3. Historical styles and techniques

2.3.1 European lace Netting is among the oldest1 of all lacelike fabrics. Although plain netting, made from prehistory to trap animals, does not constitute lace, decorated netting does. The oldest known European nets are closely-worked hairnets on German bog bodies believed to be five to six thousand years old. Much more lace-like is a Danish Bronze Age hairnet which could be mistaken for netting or crochet but which has been identified as sprang, a technique where vertically-strung lengths of yarn are horizontally looped by hand across neighbouring lengths.

Worked net (lacis) is similar in appearance to many later laces, including some examples of hollie point, drawnthread work, Hardanger embroidery, and filet crochet, although each of these originated independently at different times and in a range of countries. The visual similarity of the various types of needlework helps explain why filet crochet, mistakenly, has been assumed to have been made since medieval times, along with other nuns work.
1

The British Museum in London, for example, has Assyrian relief carvings from 728 BC (Registration numbers: 1906,0514.1 and 1856,0909.21) that show net fringes on the hems of garments and nets used in hunting.

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Chronologically, cutwork is the next significant development. The earliest English record of cutwork is what would now be called appliqu and reverse appliqu, where precise shapes are cut from cloth and the raw edges bound with buttonhole stitch. When so much fabric was cut away that the remaining threads could not support being bound, a system was devised of withdrawing sufficient threads from a linen fabric to leave a skeletal frame of interwoven threads. Although flimsy, the structure held together adequately enough to be worked, and, when entirely buttonholed, proved to be stronger than its delicate look suggested. The popularity of this reticella technique was helped greatly by the publication in 1587 of a book of needlework patterns by Federico Vinciolo. His book contributed to a nineteenth century revival of reticella, at which time it was often called Greek lace. An 1883 London Mansion House exhibition of Irish lace, incuded reticella crochet.

A freer version of drawnthread reticella soon followed. A pattern outline of laid and couched threads was covered in buttonhole stitches. Spaces within motifs were filled with decorative needlepoint patterns and the areas between motifs with buttonholed bars (brides). The technique, punto in aria, had the advantage of freeing the design from the restrictive, geometric grid of reticella. For the first time it was possible to create flowing, organic shapes in lace; ideal for an artistic form that lends itself to interpreting flora in textiles.

A second advantage of being free of the grid of reticella is that the number of threads to be covered can be easily increased or decreased to give thicker or thinner lines, as the design demanded. In skilled hands, the outcome can look sculptural: the best Venetian examples are often compared to carved ivory and are, probably, the most copied of all laces (Figs.2.g., 2.h). Since needle-made buttonhole stitches over cord are indistinguishable from those made using a hook, feasibly, a hooked technique could replicate the cordcovered elements of needlepoint, with the advantage that it is quicker to make. This was the premise behind the style of Irish Crochet that was often, confusingly, called Irish point alongside the real Irish (needle)points of Youghal, Kenmare and Inishmacsaint.

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Fashions in lace changed with fashions in fabrics and clothes; heavy Italian lace of the Baroque period gave way to lighter Alenon and Argentan as velvets and brocades were replaced by Rococo silks and satins in the eighteenth century. Its value as a status symbol ensured that demand for lace continued to outstrip supply until the 1780s French movement against ostentatious display of wealth caused the market to collapse. In the Regency period, dresses were lightweight, less decorated and more simply constructed. Lace, which had been so unfashionable that many manufacturers, (including Dublin metal-lace producers) went out of business, enjoyed a revival because of the newly-produced bobbinet. Royal patronage helped ensure the success of bobbinet: Charlotte, Princess of Wales wedding dress in 1816 was bobbinet embellished with silver. The coronation dress of Queen Adelaide, in 1829, and Queen Victorias wedding gown, in 1840, had a top layer of bobbinet decorated with bobbin lace Honiton sprigs. Net, handmade for 60 a square yard around 1800 was three pence a yard in 1853 and the wearing of lace by the middle classes became feasible. Crinolines, themselves composed of fourteen square metres of fabric, provided a suitable expanse to show off vast quantities of lace and could be overlaid with a deep lace flounce fourteen metres long, or a shawl of similar area. The Pusher and Leavers machines, from 1812 and 1813 respectively, produced worked nets. Within a few years machines adapted the Jacquard card system and could handle tens of thousands of threads, so that, By 1831 the market was flooded by machine laces (Earnshaw 1985, p.82). The lace was of finer quality, more even in its texture, and considerably more elegant in its appearance than any bone-lace whatever, and at about onethird the price of bone-lace (p.84).

13

Figures 2.c & 2.d

Figures 2.e & 2.f

Fig.2.c. An illustration from the pattern book of designer Frederico Vinciolo (1588 edition) for lacis (darned net). (Palliser 1865, p.16). Fig.2.d. One of many variations of drawnthread work, Italian, 16th century (Pollen 1908, Plate XXI, detail). Fig.2.e. Section of antique Dutch lacis from the collection of Karen McCullagh, Sligo. Fig.2.f. Section of filet crochet worked by Karen McCullagh, Sligo. The above illustrations show: (1). Why graphed charts have remained popular for so long. Vinciolos chart is still usable for many techniques including canvaswork, cross stitch, beadwork, Assisi work, Swiss darning, and the three shown. (2). The difficulty of distinguishing between similar-looking techniques when the work uses very fine threads. The lacis at 2.e. was thought by the owner to be filet crochet but digitally zooming the high resolution digital photograph shows it to be lacis. The superficial similarity of a variety of techniques helps explain why medieval nuns work is so often mistaken for crochet (Section 4.3).

14

Figure 2.g.

Figures 2.h. & 2.i.

Figure 2.j.

Fig.2.g. Venetian gros point, Austrian, 1880 (Browne 2004, Plate 87, detail). Fig.2.h. Detail from Browne (2004, Plate 87) showing the carved ivory appearance. Fig.2.i. Irish crochet version of reticella or Greek lace (Lindsey 1883, Plate 5). Fig.2.j. Section of a collar. Machine/chemical version of Venetian rose motifs with point neige brides and reticella edging. Laces from all eras are often mixed. (Authors collection).

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During the early Irish Crochet period, handmade and machine lace successfully co-existed.
Almost every description of lace is now fabricated by machinery; and it is often no easy task, even for a practised eye, to detect the difference. it has not diminished the demand for the finer fabrics of the pillow and the needle. On the contrary, the rich have sought more eagerly than ever the exquisite works of Brussels and Alenon, since machinery has brought the wearing of lace within the reach of all classes of society (Palliser 1869, p.394).

In 1862, there were 3552 lace machines in England 70% of them in Nottingham, and hundreds of thousands of hand lacemakers across Europe. Labour statistics are remarkable: a hand lace dress, for example, sold in 1867 for 3400, gave employment to forty women for seven years. The last major innovation in nineteenth century lacemaking had no direct impact on Irish lace made during the period to 1855 but ensured that later revivals, in Ireland, France and Hungary, were short-lived. From 1883, in Germany, lacelike cotton-thread machine embroidery on a silk substrate was put into caustic or chlorine solutions to perish the silk and release the undamaged embroidery as lace. Improvements were made to the chemical lace process by manufacturers in St Gall, Switzerland, where enormous quantities of very close imitations of crochet, Venetian gros point and threedimensional laces in general were produced (Kraatz 1989, p.136).

2.3.2 Irish lace 2.3.2.1 Background For more than two centuries, the textile industry and the economy of Ireland were inextricably linked. Unfair competition because of the cheapness of Irish labour was the reason given for the 1698 Parliamentary Act designed to protect the English and Welsh woollen industry. Crawford (2005, p.117) suggests that some were unaffected by the measure, which confined the export of Irish yarn to England and forbade the export of all woollen cloth:

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Over the 17th and 18th centuries in Ireland the preparation and spinning of both woollen and linen yarns by women in their own homes provided a major source of employment and income for many families. Women processed raw materials not only for the weaving of clothes and household furnishings for the Irish market but also for profitable export as yarn to thriving English textile manufacturing regions.

However, Warden (1864, [1967 edn] p.391) believes:

The effect of this [1698 Act] was to ruin the woollen trade. Several thousand manufacturers left the kingdom, some of the southern and western districts were almost depopulated, and the whole of the kingdom reduced to the utmost poverty and distress by these improvident measures.

Despite government efforts to substitute a national linen industry for the decimated wool trade, including subsidies from 1698 until the 1820s, linen production became established only around Cork and in the north east of Ireland. Emigration became an escape from unemployment and poverty: even before the 1840s famine half a million Irish-born lived in Great Britain and more than one million in North America.

Oversupply of labour meant that, even for those in the industrialised north east who had paid work, wages were pitifully low. Women were largely responsible for growing and spinning the flax which in 1825, for example, kept 70,000 handloom weavers employed. When weaving was mechanised in the nineteenth century, and mens work shifted from the domestic to the mill setting, if men did not move to the mill area, spinning by women and girls, as young as four years, became the only source of family income. According to Warden:
the superior excellence of the hand-spun Irish yarn, the low price at which it was spun, and the difficulty at first experienced in spinning by machinery the very fine numbers of yarn which is used in Ireland, all combined to delay the erection of spinning mills there (1864, p.404).

The spinners skill was remarkable1 but, eventually, they too were replaced by machines The loss of domestic spinning left many families with no income
1

Warden (1864) cites the example of specimens in the 1851 Great Exhibition which were 760 lea (equivalent to 130 miles of thread for one pound weight of spun fibre); close to being a single fibre of flax.

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other than the little earned as spriggers for the, largely Scottish, industry that produced Ayrshire embroidery or sewed muslin; and which employed 300,000 in Ireland in the 1860s.

When conditions were at their worst in nineteenth century Ireland, enterprising women introduced schemes to help their communities. Mrs Roberts, Mrs Grey Porter, Mrs Maclean, Mrs Hand and Mrs Martin, the respective initiators of Kilcullen, Carrickmacross, Inishmacsaint, Clones and Killeshandra lace, were wives of clergymen. Ursuline nuns and the related teaching order of Presentation Sisters, established and preserved the making of lace at Cork, Youghal and other convent workrooms. Meredith describes the atmosphere of the time; Ladies burst the bonds of conventialisms, and went regularly into business, to procure remunerative occupation for the destitute of their own sex (1865, p.6). In 1847, the eagerness to obtain means of support was so pressing that a perfect clamour for employment arose and The rapidity with which [the diffusion of knowledge of needlecraft] spread was almost electric ... (1865, pp.5,6).

2.3.2.2 New versions of traditional lace Figure 2.a is a very incomplete list of lace types. Some differ only slightly from others; only an expert can distinguish Arras from Lille, but others are so unalike, Alenon and Hardanger, for example, that the two would never be confused by anyone with even a minimal knowledge of lace. Lindseys map of 1883 (Figure 4.a) shows where lace was made in Ireland. Some laces have Irish names, suggesting they have features that are different enough from their source lace to warrant being named after their place of manufacture. If a place of manufacture covered an extensive area, lace was often named after the town in which the lace school or distribution and collection centre was located. A lot of Irish Crochet lace was made in the Roslea area but, because the lace was collected at Clones, the lace made

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over the whole area became known as Clones lace and the once distinctive features of Roslea lace were subsumed.

If a lace did not attempt to imitate, but developed a new version of a classic lace, it could choose to associate itself with the original until established enough, or different enough, to become known by its own name. Sometimes though, the naming conventions were complicated by other considerations: an imitation Brussels point lace called point dAngleterre was neither a point lace nor made in England, but was so called to avoid the duties imposed on foreign lace.

Many new versions of known lace appeared from the early nineteenth century when bobbinet replaced handmade reseau. Brussels net lace inspired both a version of Honiton lace, where bobbin-made motifs were attached to a machine-net, and the type of Carrickmacross lace that is primarily appliqud cambric or muslin motifs on machine-net. Although some bobbin lace and metal thread lace was made in Dublin before the nineteenth century, Ireland had never been a lacemaking country. In Ireland, as elsewhere, machine-made net was responsible for revitalising lacemaking.

2.3.2.3 Pre-1845 lace in nineteenth century Ireland Nineteenth century Irish lacemaking began near Carrickmacross, County Monaghan, around 1820 for philanthropic reasons, and was very successful at providing an income for local girls until the 1840s. It was, however, only dependent on private orders, and gradually suffered from over-production, and threatened to die out (Palliser 1902, p.440). From 1849, the manager and agent of the Bath and Shirley estates, anxious to have their tenants financially independent, revived the lace first developed in the area in 1820. The girls were trained, in the first instance, in plain work, afterwards in sewed muslin, and finally in lace (Maguire 1853, p.274). Subsequently,

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Carrickmacross became identified with some of the finest guipure that Ireland has produced (Palliser 1902, p.440). Irelands first nineteenth century non-cottage lacemaking enterprise began in Limerick in 1829 and was, initially, very successful. In England in the early "fifties" every woman of either high or low degree [possessed] at least a lace collar or fichu of Limerick lace (Lowes 1919, p.169): at which point the, now commonplace, lace went out of fashion. 1500 women made Limerick lace in 1855; but just 500 ten years later. The tambouring and needlerun versions were too easily produced by non-specialists and, from the 1830s, by machines.

Carrickmacross and Limerick were the only laces made commercially in Ireland immediately before crochet making began. An advantage of crochet over the others was that it was not, at that time, reproducible by machine. Meredith summarises other advantages: The art was easily acquired, the materials were inexpensive, and the market was ready (1865, p.9). It proved to be ideal for Irish makers for the following reasons:

It required no complicated or expensive tools; often just a sewing needle pushed point first into a piece of whittled wood and the eye of the needle filed to form a hook.

The maker did not need space for a frame the size of the work being made, as was needed for Carrickmacross. Unlike Carrickmacross and Limerick lace, crochet can withstand heavy laundering, a useful attribute when made in overcrowded and peatsmoke-filled homes.

All levels of ability could be accommodated: beginners could quickly learn simple motifs and repetitive edgings, and progress over time to complicated work; those with artistic skills could arrange finished motifs on a temporary backing parchment before expert makers created a ground to hold the pieces together.

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Chapter 3. British crochet to 1855

3.1 Origins

Irish Crochet is an amalgam of two types of crochet that began in separate places in Ireland, each type derived from a different source. Chapter 2 traced the lineage of needlelace, from which the Kilcullen strand developed. This chapter examines the roots of crochet, which was the source for the lace that was first made in Ireland in County Cork.

In 1840, crochet was a new craft. Because there was no precedent for how it should look, for the first few years, in Britain, it waivered between knitting, netting and lace. Styles of crochet would, probably, have remained variations of knitting and netting if books containing illustrations of worked crochet had not been published in England and Scotland from the mid 1840s. The illustrations enabled a craft that was easy to follow, if seen, but difficult to grasp from verbal or textual descriptions alone, to become lacelike. Just at the time that illustrations appeared in books, Irish women began to make crochet lace.

In summary, this chapter shows: crochet is not synonymous with nuns work, and began in the nineteenth century crochet has roots in knitting and netting, with connections to tambouring and needlelace two styles of crochet developed simultaneously and independently in Britain; one derived from shepherds knitting and the other from netting the early history of crochet in Britain can be reconstructed from pattern books of the1840s crochet changed direction during the 1840s because of changes in published pattern books

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3.1.1 Nuns work

There is no doubt that making and teaching needlework have been major occupations of nuns for many centuries. Palliser (1865, p.8) writes:
Needlework was the daily employment of the convent. As early as the fourteenth century it was termed nuns work; [Reference: 1380 inventory of Charles V] and even now, in secluded parts of the kingdom, ancient lace is styled by that name.

Alford (1886, p.324) confirms:

Embroidery till the thirteenth century had been entirely in the hands of cloistered women, and the ladies who practised it learned their craft with the rest of their education in convents, and their work was simply ecclesiastical and dedicatory.

The first white laces appeared during the medieval period just after white embroidery was used to decorate white linen. Any white needlework began to be referred to as nuns work. Opus Anglicanum embroidery between 1250 and 1350, produced in English cloistered communities and secular workshops, was considered the finest in Europe. It would be reasonable to assume, therefore, that crochet, a relatively simple textile technique requiring little more than a hook, yarn and instruction in how to make a chain stitch, would have been known to those who designed and made complex needlework, and that it was among the skills practised and taught by nuns. Many authors believe this to be the case1.

Tatting and Crochet Lessons, for H.F. Verran Company, 1915, Royal Society Press, New York, 1, (5) p.1: The golden age of lace was of course the sixteenth century, and crochet arose in the nunneries during the period that lace making was at its height. It was not very fully developed, however, until much later, when the Irish workers succeeded in copying Italian point in the most beautiful way they have ever been copied. The Young Ladies Journal [Anon]., 1885, E. Harrison, London: Crochet of a very fine quality was worked by nuns on the Continent in the sixteenth century, but was not popular work in England until about 1840, when for quite twenty years it was very fashionable . This more elaborate kind of crochet comes to England still in large quantities as Irish point (p.25). Boyle (1971, p.20, referencing Caulfeild and Saward 1887, p.102) writes that: Crochet had been practised in European convents since the sixteenth century, and was called, like most lace and embroidery, nuns work.

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Potter (1990, p.12) cites a 1653 reference to au crochet, et au fuseau as evidence for crochets early existence. The source could be referring to either the small hook used by bobbin lace makers to pull through loose ends, or a large hook to hold the centre of lengths of threads while they are twisted or plaited into braids or laces. What is clear is that the reference is to tools hooks and bobbins - rather than a technique. Potter acknowledges that no ancient crochet hooks have been found although many needles, pins and bobbins have been archaeologically unearthed and that, unlike other needlecrafts, there is a notable absence of early crochet pieces in museum collections and texts. She also concedes that, While paintings are often an excellent source of detailed information there are no paintings available in the worlds galleries that show recognizable crochet until the mid-1800s (p.12). Precious metal crochet hooks, datable from hallmarks, appear only from that time. Research by Paludan (1995) supports the conclusion that Nothing definite can be said about the history of crochet before 1800, as there is no concrete proof of its existence (p.76).

The release of large quantities of Spanish lace made by nuns coincided with the beginnings of crochet and each seems to have become confused with the other. Palliser writes:
We may safely say that the fine Church lace of Spain was but little known to the commercial world of Europe until the dissolution of the Spanish monasteries [Footnote: Spain had 8932 convents in 1787] in 1830, when the most splendid specimens of nuns work came suddenly into the market; not only the heavy lace generally designated Spanish point, but pieces of the very finest description (1869, p.75 and footnote)

Lambert (1842, 1844) and Owen (1844) show that crochet became fashionable in Britain during the late 1830s. Lambert writes (1842, p.147) that Crochet work, although long known and practised, did not attract particular attention until within the last four years, since which time it has been brought to great perfection . Lambert (1842) gives precise instructions on how to form stitches, how to wrap thread round fingers appropriately and even how to hold the hook; suggesting that crochet-making

23

was an uncommon skill. Tambour needles in screw handles were adequate substitutes until crochet hooks became widely available. All needlework manuals were in their infancy. Miss Watts (1840, [5th edn.] preface) little volume on knitting and netting, the only one hitherto published on this subject, was a bestseller. Although the first pattern for crochet is widely reported to have appeared in the 1824 Dutch magazine, Pnelop (Paludan 1995, p.76), the earliest known book to include crochet patterns was by knitting specialist Mrs Jane Gaugain of Edinburgh, in 1840.

The text and the inconsistency in spelling indicate that a few crochet patterns were included at the last minute in response to demand from her pupils and customers; and, perhaps, to offer something distinctive compared with Miss Watts book which did not include crochet. Mrs Gaugain advertises that she gives instruction in Knitting, Netting and the various Kinds of Embroidery; but not crochet. The simplicity of the patterns suggests the author was herself just learning the technique. Inconsistent terminology - the word is spelled crochet in the contents and crotchet on the cover and used interchangeably with tambour - reflects the newness of the craft: for Mee (1844, p.68) the word crochet describes technique, stitches and hook. Eventually, the lexicography was standardised: until then, hook, needle and crochet; recipe, receipt and pattern; and, tambour, crochet and crotchet were used interchangeably. Crochets increasing popularity during the 1840s can be gauged by the fact that at the beginning of the decade a few patterns were included in knitting or needlework books but from 1844 (Mee) whole books of crochet patterns were printed. Ballantyne (2007b) lists more than thirty books of crochet lace patterns published in Britain between 1846 and 1849.

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3.1.2 Shepherds knitting

Shepherds knitting produces a textile that looks like a conventional closeknitted fabric. The difference is in process; instead of working multiple stitches from one needle to another in rows, as is usually done in knitting, shepherds knitting loops a single stitch at a time using a hook. Highland Lady, Elizabeth Grant, provides the first dated reference to shepherds knitting. Although not published until 1898, her memoirs, written in the 1840s, describe shepherds knitting she saw in 1812 as a child in Scotland. Even when crochet was well known, tightly worked single or slip stitch crochet was commonly called Scottish knitting. Lambert (1844, p.1) describes crochet as a species of knitting originally practised by the peasants of Scotland. She gives crochet patterns for multicoloured receipts that would be difficult to distinguish from knitting when completed. In one version, the pattern is only viewable from the front because unworked colours are carried along the back. In a variation unworked wool is not passed along the back but crocheted over so that the textile is reversible and, significantly for Irish Crochet, the rows are padded. Emphasising the connection with knitting Lambert describes the technique as being suitable for invalids and those with poor eyesight and gives patterns for items normally knitted: slippers, purses, cushions and tablecovers. In these early books there is no mention of lace and no patterns for collars. Gaugain (1840, p.190) suggests a way of adjusting tension to create a lacy effect in an otherwise solid fabric: for a Plain French Tambour Long Purse the maker should Work with a fine ivory hook; this hook being coarser than the silk, gives it the appearance of an open stitch.

3.1.3 Tambouring

Decorating woven fabric or animal skins using a hooked awl is a skill with a long history in India. A version, using silk and fine hooked needles, became a

25

fashionable pastime for aristocratic women at the end of the eighteenth century. Named from the hoop that holds fabric drum-tight (tambour, French: drum) while being worked, tambouring uses a thin, sharp hooked needle to create continuous chain-stitched lines on the surface of an existing fabric. Just as drawnthread work jumped to punto in aria, so tambouring on fabric as embellishment gave way to tambouring in aria, in effect, crochet, which does not decorate fabric but creates it.

No-one is credited with developing crochet from tambouring. Paludan writes: A widely accepted view is that crochet developed in France from tambouring at the end of the eighteenth century (1995, p.76), and suggests that crochet was first made when someone realised it was possible to tambour off the edges of a fabric to form a fringe. It is also possible that a fine fabric tore or rotted and it was noticed that the released chain stitches held together without a base fabric; or perhaps a tambourer continued making stitches across a hole in a woven fabric or net.

The reticella version of drawnthread work seems to be so closely related to filet crochet that it is possible that crochet developed along this route. What began with the use of a hook to whip threads around a cord - to reproduce needlepoints buttonhole stitches - could have developed into a way of using the hook without the underlying structure that remains when the majority of threads are withdrawn from a woven fabric. Figure 2.j from Lindsey (1883), and described as Greek lace, shows an Irish example of a reticella-crochet hybrid; rarely used for fashion items but often made to decorate household linens.

3.1.4 Netting

When derived from tambouring, crochet lent itself to being interpreted as a variant of netting. In the early 1840s netting was popular for creating open fabrics for gloves and table mats or shapes that, when lined, became purses. As a more conveniently executed substitute, crochet, using the same range

26

of threads, from finest silk to coarse yarn, almost entirely replaced netting within a few years. Many pattern books published from 1840 to 1845 included netting patterns, but, as crochet patterns increased, the number of netting patterns reduced, and relatively few appeared after 1845.

3.1.5 Needlelace connection

Chapter 2 showed that it was common practice to name imitation laces after quality laces to give the new version some status. In Britain, early crochet lace patterns continued the practice even though they had no connection, stylistically or geographically, with any bobbin or needle laces. Mee (1846b) names her collars, the first crochet lace patterns published, Brussels, Grecian, point, guipure, Lisle, and Dresden. Riego (1847) continues the trend giving point names to her crochet collars: Angleterre, Guise, Valois, etc. and Wheeler (1847) includes Honiton and Valenciennes among her crochet collar pattern names. Chapter 4 will show it was Irish Crochet, although not named after any foreign lace, which re-established the stylistic connections with needlepoints.

3.1.6 Crossover in materials and patterns

While establishing itself as an independent craft, crochet often switched between knitting and netting styles. The looped (chain) stitch connects all three, as Gaugain suggests when she writes of the elementary stitch of Knitting, Netting and Crochet-work (1840, Preface). In that book, the first to include crochet patterns, just 12 are given, after 97 knitting and 25 netting patterns but most of the crochet could just as easily be netting: for example, (pattern CXXIV, page 189), a Long Purse, Open Stitch of Single Tambour describes a simple diamond net. Maguire (1853, p.254) shows that, at times, two techniques were combined in one piece of work: he describes a knitted polka jacket edged in crochet. Warren (1848) combines netting and crochet.

27

Warren (1848) is typical of many early crochet manuals in showing the multidirectional potential of the new craft: patterns are given for two and three-dimensional work; from flat edgings as substitutes for expensive bobbin and needle laces, to a 3D vase of coloured flowers. All weights of mono and polychromatic yarns and threads in silk, cotton, linen and wool created outcomes that could be as closely-worked as a solid fabric to as open as a netting substitute1. Although numerous patterns for coloured crochet were published, including many that included coloured beads, Kraatz believes coloured lace was never very popular, except for the woollen laces of Le Puy, made in all colours in the 1850s (1989, p.165). Crochet, within a few years, found its direction and settled into being, almost entirely, a monochromatic, thread lace for the rest of the nineteenth century.

3.2

Pattern books 1840 1855

A sufficient experiential base seems to have existed in crafts with a long history, for example, knitting, to enable visualisation of finished work without illustrations. Even when knitting became a recreational activity in the late 1830s complicated knitting patterns were described in text. Because no general knowledge of crochet existed, there were problems in writing textonly patterns. Gaugain, for example, (1840, p.195) after giving instructions for a Double tambour spiral chain writes; I do not, however, think that this chain can be accomplished without some previous knowledge of it. Other writers comment on the difficulty. Owen (1844, p.75) writes, Enough has been said to give as good an idea of the mode of working Crochet as it is possible to do, by merely verbal description and Lambert (1842 p.148), believes Crochet, although in itself a most simple stitch, is difficult to explain
1

Riego de la Branchardiere, E., c1851, Exhibition Book of Crochet Elegancies, Faudel and Phillips, London. Anon.,1842, The Ladies Handbook of Knitting, Netting, and Crochet, London. Great Exhibition catalogue, 1851, Class XIX, Entry number 261, A crochet table-cover in Berlin wool.

28

in writing . Savage (1847, p.82) comments on how the basic crochet stitch is by then so generally known that the novice might, by five minutes exercise with any one possessing a knowledge of its mysteries, obtain more real information than from the most elaborately written description."

Illustrations, until the middle of the decade, were similar to the simple graph paper charts used by makers of canvaswork, cross stitch, beadwork and other techniques. Text in such books was superfluous, consisting of colourchange instructions that were obvious to anyone looking at the squared paper. Lambert (1844) marked a turning point: My Crochet Sampler had illustrations of hand position, a crochet hook and basic stitches. The breakthrough in publications at that time is evident by comparing the first and second editions of Crochet Explained (Mee 1845,1846a). In the first edition, more than 100 pages of text could be summarised by: cut a template to any desired shape and change yarn colour to correspond to the squares in any of the attached graphed patterns. Four small illustrations of how stitches should look were probably the most informative part of the book. The second edition had whole page engravings of pattern sections, from which stitches could be read without reference to any text. The success of this edition resulted in the patterns, now readable from illustrations, being re-published, within months, as a separate book (Mee, 1846b).

This research suggests that: had book illustrations not become commonplace from the mid-1840s, crochet, as a recreational activity, would have remained a form of knitting, using wool and large hooks, or netting, using fine yarn and hooks, but would not, at that time, have developed into a lacemaking technique. Mrs Mees (1846a) book marks the point at which crochet changed direction. Once patterns that would have been impossible to follow in text could be understood by looking at an illustration, crochet was no longer restricted to being a variation of knitting or netting, and could become an elaborate form of lace.

When stitches in worked patterns could be seen in book engravings, crochet burgeoned. To meet the demand for patterns, books went from being large,

29

expensive volumes of hundreds of pages that covered many needlecrafts to being, often, tiny (10cm X 11.5cm) books1 of sixteen pages, sometimes with a single pattern. Publishing books in this format meant that there was a shorter turnaround time some authors were able to produce three or more books in a year (Mee 1846; Riego 1849). Makers were able to buy only those patterns that they knew they would work and designers could improve on previous editions: Eureka (1848), for example, published a second edition three months after the first in which a recut woodblock engraving of the finished collar, its only pattern, improved stitch identification. Riegos first crochet book (1847) furthered clarity by having illustrations of close-ups of stitch formation.

The majority of authors of early books had haberdashery businesses and taught needlecraft to women with disposable income to stimulate sales of their goods. Gaugain (1840) lists four royals, and more than one hundred titled women among her patrons and subscribers. Some authors mention that their books are suitable for all classes but the contents suggest crochet was promoted in books as a recreational pastime for leisured women.

Hypothetically, if illustrations had not appeared in the mid 1840s, crochet lace making would have been available only to women like these who could get instruction directly from teachers. Without illustrated books, for the majority of British women, crochet would have remained variants of knitting and netting. In Ireland, where making skills were freely passed from person to person by demonstration, crochet lace could have been made.

For example - Warren Mrs [Eliza], 1847, The Court Collar and Cuff Book, Ackerman & Co., London. Price sixpence.

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Chapter 4. Irish Crochet to 1855

Fig.4.a. Lindsey and Biddles map showing where all types of lace were made in 1883 (red dots) and areas where lacemaking had almost died out (blue dots).

According to Meredith (1865), crochet was produced in: Adare Blackrock Clonmel Roscrea Anamult Blarney Cork Roslea Ardara Borrisleigh Kilcullen Thurles Ardee Carrigaline Kildare Youghal Ballingarry Coachford Kinsale Bandon Clones New Ross

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Lindsey (1883, p.4) writes that for all the enterprises begun to help counteract the effects of the Famine years, it is not easy to find month and year when in each case the work began. For crochet, the first dated reference in Ireland is to its being made by the pupils of the industrial school at the Presentation Convent in Cork, and sold in 1845. Indisputably, the first crochet seen by one of the earliest groups to make crochet in Ireland, in County Kildare, was a sample that was brought from England. No-one knows the source for the crochet of the second, Cork, group. It is possible that they too saw English work: through trade and temporary migration for work, there was a lot of movement between mainland Britain and Ireland in the mid-1900s. Just as feasible is the possibility that Cork crochet came to Ireland directly from the Continent. During the formative years for crochet, Ireland had close connections with continental Europe, partly because of the tradition of sending the children of wealthy families to Belgium, France, Spain or Italy, to be educated by members of Catholic religious orders; and nuns were often skilled needlewomen. A third potential source for crochets appearance in Cork is as a derivative of tamboured lace, great quantities of which were made in nearby Limerick from 1829. Regardless of how it arrived, in both Kildare and Cork crochet very soon changed from the way it originally looked. An examination of the earliest dated examples supports two inferences. The first is: Irish makers were aware of, and influenced by, what was happening outside Ireland but the distinctive style now recognised worldwide as inimitably Irish is the result of the initiative of the makers themselves. The second is: although Irish Crochet developed simultaneously in two areas of Ireland, each had distinctive stylistic characteristics because of different initial influences. One style began as a crocheted needlelace variation of Venetian raised lace; the other was rooted in technique rather than any particular pre-existing style.

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4.1

The research dates

The research period begins in 1840 in Britain because in that year the first known English language book was published that contained crochet patterns, and 1845 in Ireland because that marks the first mention of crochet being made here. The period under closest research scrutiny ends in 1855 for the following reasons.

International exhibitions of art and industry in London (1851) and Dublin (1853) and a National exhibition in Cork (1852) showed crochet from throughout the United Kingdom. The large number of people attending exhibitions1 increases the likelihood there was cross-fertilisation of designs, making it increasingly difficult to attribute stylistic differences to their sources.

Men of business began to deal in Irish lace from about 1852. A manual of about twelve designs was published in January 1853 by Marsland, an English thread manufacturer. Even though there is no evidence that Irish designs were unduly influenced by dealers, or that any makers used Marslands manual, the publication signals the end of the period of design autonomy.

By 1855, the worst of the devastating effects of the Famine were over; there was less demand for lace by those who bought it as a way of providing charitable support for the makers. Many enterprises begun after 1845 had already ceased production by the mid 1850s.

Few verifiably-dated examples of early Irish Crochet exist. A small collection, acquired by the V&A just after its founding in 1852, comprises the only Irish Crochet available to this research that is known to have been made before 1855. The next accurately dated work, an altar cloth made for the Novitiate Chapel of The Religious Sisters of Charity, Dublin, was made in 18582.

The Illustrated Exhibitor (1851, p. 295) gives the number attending the 1851 London exhibition as 4,205,509: Maguire (1853, p.424) shows 138,375 attended the 1852 Cork exhibition; and Sproule (1854, p.26) gives 956,295 as the number of visitors to the Dublin exhibition of 1853.
2

The altar cloth was presented in May 1858 to Mother Mary Augustine (Mrs Aikenhead, who died in July 1858). The presentation date was confirmed by Sister Maria Coates, Manager of th the Mary Aikenhead Centre, on 26 April 2011.

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4.2

Parallels with British crochet

4.2.1 Knitting There is no evidence that shepherds knitting was made in Ireland but before machines became capable of reproducing their work, knitting with needles was the only source of income for several thousand Irish women in the early 1850s. Lambert (1842, pp.185,187) writes of the splendid specimens of knitting done by the poor Irish cottage girls where the fineness, variety, and perfection, exhibited in this knitting, almost exceed belief as to the possibility of its execution by the hand. Makers received sixpence for a pair of fine wool socks, or even fourpence, if persons can be found to give no more (Hall 1843, p.472).

The small return for many hours of work caused some knitting enterprises to diversify. By 1847, Mrs Roberts sister-in-laws group in Kilcullen (Thornton, in Lindsey, 1883) had begun to crochet because they could no longer make a living from knitting polka jackets.

It is interesting that the Kilcullen women transferred their skills to crocheted lace rather than knitted lace. The Dublin Society, around 1770, had offered prizes for thread lace made with knitting needles but the only examples of Irish-made knitted thread lace discovered during the course of this research were shown at the 1853 Dublin exhibition. The collection, made at Mrs Veevers industrial school in County Leitrim, included a shawl made from nettle fibre, a scarf from daisies, polkas from japonica and marsh mallow, parasols from sweet pea, nasturtium and convolvulus, and cloth from a mix of wild bog-down and wool fibres. Some of the collection, along with fibre and worked samples, is now at The Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew1 in the Economic Botany Collection.

A complete photographic record of the collection was sent by email to the author by Dr Mark Nesbitt of the Jodrell Laboratory at Kew, with a copy of an article about the lace, written by Mairead Dunlevy and E. Charles Nelson, Sir Williams Irish Lace Gifts from an Irish Viscountess, and published for the Bentham-Moxon Trust in 1995 by Blackwell, Oxford.

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4.2.2

Tambouring

A great number of Irish women tamboured, mainly at Charles Walkers company in Limerick. Earnshaw (1985, p.82) describes how:
the run, or needlerun, technique began in Nottingham, and had spread by the 1830s to Limerick, in Ireland. Tambour, or chain-stitch, embroidery on patent nets, which had been popular in France in the late eighteenth century, had become established in England, at Coggeshall, in the 1820s, but using bobbinet. Again the technique spread to Ireland where it became known as Limerick tambour.

Lindsey (1883) makes the connection between tambouring and crocheting through their having a common tool, and supports the idea that the skill was first developed by leisured women and, sometime later, adopted by others.

Whoever suggested the tambour needle, for ladies to amuse themselves in producing crochet work, at the same time indirectly conferred a great boon on the poor. Had factories with their thousand spindles been planted in Cork, they would not have wrought so great a change as has been wrought by the magic force of this simple artistic instrument. In Limerick it was used to inweave the thread in the meshes of the net, and to form those designs of beauty that charm the eye. In Cork, it became a kind of independent knitting-needle, doing more work and better than any pair of knitting-pins had ever done (Lindsey 1883, p.5).

4.2.3

Netting

There is no evidence to suggest that netting was popular in Ireland as a hobby activity, as it was in England until crochet replaced it. According to Maguire (1853), among the many post-Famine commercial ventures, silk hairnets were made at the industrial schools of The Sisters of Mercy, St. Mary, Arnott and Cork. Boyle (1971) believes that the female relatives of Cork fishermen transferred skill in making fishing nets to crochet-making but there is no reason to believe they had netting skills: basic crochet is so easily learnt that someone starting without previous needle skills is at no great disadvantage.

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4.2.4

Needlelace

Chapter 2 showed that all needlelaces are formed with buttonhole stitch and that they developed from drawnthread work, via reticella to punto in aria. Chapter 3 showed that British crochet is chain stitch, the same stitch that comprises tambouring and knitting; and the openness of the style is derived from netting. British designers producing patterns for the large number of crochet books published and sold between 1840 and 1855 created, predominantly, crochet patterns. Usually, their only connection with needlelace was in the name; given, as Chapter 2 showed, in keeping with tradition, to add cachet, and that bobbin lace names were used just as frequently, and equally unjustifiably.

Although Mrs Roberts and her Kilcullen neighbours used her English crochet piece as a learning sample, the women then copied a needlelace to create a new form of crochet. No lace names were given to Irish work (probably because it never appeared in books of patterns), so the Kilcullen style that derived from needlepoint became known, confusingly, as Irish point. The Irish crochet made in Cork was influenced by, but made no attempt to copy bobbin lace or needle lace and appears to have been similar, in the beginning, to the simple, continuous-length crochet being made in Britain. Innovations by the makers themselves caused the style to change to a noncontinuous, relatively flat lace. When seen today, both the Kilcullen and Cork styles are identifiably Irish Crochet, but most work made after the first decade is an amalgam of the two styles, since they happened to combine well.

4.3

Origins of Irish crochet

Most recent writers on the subject have accepted the opinion of historian Elizabeth Boyle (1971), who assigns a much earlier date to crochet in Ireland than can be substantiated, and a route into the country that is entirely

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speculative. She assumes it was included in European nuns work from the sixteenth century and suggests (p.20),
Possibly its importation into Cork may be attributed to the four first Ursulines, travelling between France and Ireland at a time when quantities of lace were in use. In any case the knowledge of crochet probably reached Cork before 1789, when the French Revolution made it difficult for members of religious orders to travel from France to Ireland. It is supposed to have arrived in Ireland at an early date, and no likely traveller and teacher of a later period has been suggested. At least as soon as the 1830s, when crochet first became really fashionable, the womenfolk of salmon fishers on Corks River Lee were skilled in working it to supplement their husbands earnings [Reference: endnote 4, page 35: information based on personal correspondence to Boyle from Mother M. Ursula of the Ursuline Convent, Blackrock]. Probably their knowledge of net making had helped them to start, but they could never have been commercially successful without professional teaching.

However, there is no evidence that crochet was made in Ireland before the 1840s. Lindsey, much closer in time to the original makers, writes; It is not remembered into whose hands it first came, or in what spot it commenced. He believes that it is from Blackrock in 1845 that we can trace the growth of a great industry that in a few years formed a part of education in almost every convent (1883, p.5).

Susanna Meredith established the Adelaide School for lacemaking in Cork in 1847 and later (1865) wrote about her experiences. John Francis Maguire, lawyer, journalist, MP for twenty years, Mayor of Cork in 1852 and prominent advocate of female suffrage1 wrote about, what he called, the Female Industrial Movement (1853, pp.183-258). His contemporaneous account of lacemaking in Ireland to 1853 is limited to those individuals and groups who submitted work for the 1852 national exhibition in Cork but, because of his proximity in time and place, he, and Mrs Meredith, must be regarded as the most reliable witnesses of the events under scrutiny here.

Although it seems reasonable to believe that relatives of fishermen would make crochet as a development of their skill in netting, Maguire (1853) shows
1

Webb, A., 1878, A Compendium of Irish Biography, M.H. Gill & Son, Dublin.

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that there is no basis for believing crochet making in Ireland originated with them. He writes:
For many years before the Famine, the peninsula of Blackrock was painfully remarkable for the intense poverty and severe sufferings of its inhabitants The fathers and grown-up sons devoted themselves to [salmon fishing] while the female members of the family remained at home, generally destitute of any useful or profitable occupation. In fact, the female population of that district grew up in almost complete idleness; the only chance of employment afforded them, being service in the families of the local gentry, or in the city of Cork, little more than two miles distant. One would say that an industrial movement would be an inestimable blessing to this district; and so it proved to be, ere long (p.203). [The nuns at Blackrock] fortunately hit upon the plan of adding industrial to purely educational training; and, in the year 1845, they commenced [italics added] that crochet work which has been since brought to the most wonderful perfection, so as to equal, if not surpass, in beauty and delicacy, almost any description of lace (p.204).

Most of the first years output was bought by Mrs Dwyer, a businesswoman who traded with English outlets. Markets in America, India and Germany soon followed. Meredith (1865, p.371) quotes an extract of a letter from Mrs Roberts of Kilcullen, that suggests a possible alternative starting place for the first crochet in Ireland. In the letter, Mrs Roberts writes the work originated here but unfortunately, gives no date for the events she describes. What is known is that one of her pupils was sufficiently experienced to go to Clones in 1847 to teach women there. Because more lace was produced in Cork than Kildare, for longer1, and a start year can be attached to it, Cork is widely accepted as the place of origin for all crochet in Ireland. Once established, the industrys expansion was fast and extensive: thirty four industrial schools showed work at the Cork exhibition in 1852, and forty six in Dublin the following year. The decline was similarly rapid, beginning around

There were 700 makers in the Kilcullen area in the 1850s but Time works great changes; only a few months since an inquiry was being made in Dublin for a competent person to go into Kildare, to teach the young people how to do crochet work (Lindsey 1883, p.7).

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the mid 1850s. Many industrial schools stopped trading before Mrs Meredith closed hers in 1859 and moved to England1.

4.4

Pattern books in Ireland

Figure 4.n shows a section of a simple, wordy code and illustrates the problems 1840s crocheters would have had before engravings of worked examples were introduced into pattern books as guides to help makers accurately interpret what was being described in words. It is unlikely that many Irish makers would have read fluently enough to be able to decipher patterns, or been able to afford the books.

Today, as in the past, anyone teaching needlecraft techniques almost certainly has worked examples to illustrate processes and someone learning techniques creates worked examples as practice pieces or as memory aids. The system, where an expert maker demonstrates technique to one person or a small group of learners, and illustrates the stages by a series of samples, which the learner then uses for reference while working the copies, has been the preferred way of learning needlecrafts for hundreds of years. This is despite its obvious limitation; being useful only for the few who have access to a personal instructor and can see and touch the samples.

The work in surviving Irish Victorian crochet sampler books, in coarser thread than was generally used, suggests that students started with coarse work and by the time they progressed to fine, sellable work they did not need to do practice pieces or have samples for reference. Meredith (1865, p.83) confirms the village schools around Cork that made only plain collars and edgings were instructed by the samples sent to be copied.

To begin the work for which she is best remembered, as a reformer of conditions for women prisoners. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oup.com/oxforddnb/info/.

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Owen (1844) and Riegos magazine (1852 1854) were published in Dublin, and pattern books were available, but all the indications are that these resources were used by recreational makers and not those earning money from crochet.

Few pattern books appear to have circulated in Ireland because they were not needed: the comprehensive industrial school system of personal instruction using, mainly, in-house patterns was very effective and bypassed the problem of copyright. In the OBrien school, trainees learn from the most experienced scholars. One good worker teaches six girls (Maguire 1853, p.187). At the Ursuline Convent School in County Cork, The children are trained in a very short time, and exhibit the most wonderful aptitude for learning. A mere child is frequently able to perform her task well in two or three months; and there are but few instances where they have not mastered every difficulty at the end of six months (Maguire 1853, p. 206).

4.5

Sources of design

Meredith (1865, p.6) writes that the founders of the various schools, both secular and religious, developed an extraordinary skill in needlework, and, also, a great commercial aptitude to turn it to a profitable account. The women who initiated the enterprises also accepted responsibility for providing the patterns in the various crafts. In the 1820s, Mrs Grey Porter and Ann Steadman, using lace brought from Italy, designed the first patterns for what later became Carrickmacross lace ( Clirigh, 1985). Lady OBrien designed for the industrial embroidery school she set up in County Clare: when the business expanded to four hundred children, she procured a work-mistress from the Continent and got patterns and designs from Paris (Maguire 1853, p.185). In 1850, instructors from Belgium and England were invited by the Ladies Irish Industrial Society to teach bobbin lace at the Normal Lace School in Dublin (Meredith 1865, p.78). Lady De Vere taught the mistress of a school on her own demesne at Curragh to copy some lace that she had

40

bought in Brussels (Lindsey 1883, p.4). Mrs Lynam, who taught at the Countess of Ernes school, used Lady Ernes patterns or her own (Boyle 1971, p.61). In Cork the newest designs are got direct from Paris for sprigging (Maguire 1853, p.199), although, for the majority who worked it for Scottish manufacturers, the fabric was delivered to them already printed with the design.

For their experiment in industry, crochet, as an entirely new creation (Meredith 1865, p.8), had neither teachers who could be brought from somewhere else nor a catalogue of available patterns: sources in any other country are not mentioned by Maguire or Meredith. Students at Lady Deanes School, the Adelaide School, and the Convent Schools at Blackrock, Youghal and Kinsale kept their own and other schools supplied with new patterns and stitches, and in Clones, when the Kilcullen teacher left she was replaced by one of the first professionally trained designers (Meredith, 1865). All the indications are that Irish Crochet designs were devised by the makers themselves. Meredith (1865, p.51) writes:
crochet is not imitative in its manipulation, it has had no formula or models to copy from, no foreign forerunners to take pattern by, and yet it took its place in the land; avoiding the small portions of the country where the other sorts of lace prevail and maintaining its distance from sewed muslin

Maguire (1853, p.212) credits Lady Deane for providing some of the first crochet designs, because, although the peculiar stitch was well known in Blackrock in 1845 there was vast room for improvement. Mrs Hall (in Maguire 1853, p.210) describes how Lady Deane began:
Crochet-work, she thought, would not be very difficult; she knew the demand for it was increasing, and that even the earliest executed would bring in some remuneration. She instantly set about learning the stitch and designing patterns for the work, and in less than a fortnight she had her workers employed.

Some nuns had design skills. Maguire (1853, p.207) writes of a berthe of the most sumptuous description, which was designed by the gifted member of the community who conducts the school, and worked by one of the children.

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Maguire shows that the initiative for designing could come from the young makers themselves, and in a way that seems intuitive and spontaneous.
I should wrong these children if I allowed it [to] be understood that their talent was purely mechanical, such as depended principally upon dexterity and neatness in the execution of a given task. It is nothing of the kind; although this is a most valuable talent in itself, and one that is productive of admirable results. But they exhibit a readiness of invention, and a facility of design, which are truly wonderful; and it is no uncommon thing to see a child of twelve or thirteen years old varying the pattern set before her, and imparting new attractions to her work, by the most delicate and beautiful additions, suggested by her own fancy. Some are so clever, that they use the pattern with the utmost freedom, selecting those portions of it of which their taste approves, and combining the remainder into the most elegant and fanciful designssuch as have frequently excited the astonishment of their delighted teacher (Maguire 1853, p.206).

Meredith agrees that:

those who took to it, generally, in a short time, did what they liked with it, and [produced] the most complicated entanglement of designs, according to the degrees of sophistication of the workers. How they wearied themselves, to find that which was never yet seen under the sun, and how they toiled and laboured, to make out a way in which to express their sense of the beautiful (1865, p.87).

Later, when wholesalers became involved and wanted, for example, hundreds of dozen-yard-pieces of trimmings (p.213) Meredith found there were differences among the makers, related to their background, which caused some to be good at doing repetitive work to order and others to find mechanical work impossible:
Some that took it up among the Anglo-Irish kept it within rules and restrictions, according to the nature of their orderly habits. With them it was a simple matter of imitative necessity, not of genius and spirit; it was to them a stern business effort, not a wild enterprise, and had nothing in it for them but the plain prose of a commonplace work. To the others, it was a poem wrought with passion (1865, pp. 89-90).

Merediths experience of the second group was that:

the nature of the work was adverse to their disposition. It is mechanical, and uncontrollable by fancy, and has a fixed price that cannot be unsettled by any manoeuvring. There are not powers connected with it, whereby a new sudden

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alteration of pattern may confuse the dealer; and give the maker a temporary advantage (1865, p.216).

Among those who found there was more profit, and pleasure, in making showy, striking looking goods (1865, p.226) was a girl who told Meredith;
theres hope in it. I may get ever so much for what I makes, if I happen to hit on a new stitch, and all the time Im at it, I dont know but I may have a lot of money coming to me; and Im kep in spirits like, to the last moment; but that pillow-work och, tis horrid, maam! youre made sinsible from the beginning that youre only to get the trifle of a price, no more, nor no less, and no thoughts will help you, you must go on with the thing to your ordthers, which is what I wont do, until I cant help it; plase God! (1865, p.374).

Meredith describes the skill of Mary Desmond, her composite lacemaker, as being like a sleight of hand, an art a sort of legerdemain known only to herself, something that she worked, as she said, out of her own head a notion stereotyped in thread (p.213). Marys intuitive perception enabled her to translate rags of old lace into very striking bits (p.223).

The tendency to want to work independently of patterns caused problems in fulfilling orders in Cork until a system of subdivision was devised (p.222). Possibly the idea for specialising in just one part of a multi-task process came from Cork workers earlier unsuccessful attempts at sprigging where as many as twenty people collaborated in each piece produced. Possibly, the idea came from seeing a similar system in needlelace or appliqu lace workshops: or the idea might have been the Cork workers own. However it happened, having crocheters make only those parts of a design they were able and willing to do, and then joining the bits later, solved many production problems. It also meant there was work for all levels of ability. When one childs lacemaking earnings enabled her family to come out of the workhouse her mother became a lace washer, one sister a pinner and tacker, and two more made bits and barred (Meredith 1865, p.44). In Cork schools, the system meant production increased, orders were completed on time and designs could not be pirated so easily.

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Meredith shows that if the same textile craft were made in different parts of Ireland local variations developed: crochet, after the manner of lace, showed adherence to habitat, and tenacity of type (1865, p.9). In the early years,
It settled into several centres, Cork and Clones becoming the most important of them and these maintained their distinctive characteristics most determinedly (p.9). the recognition of the products of the different districts is well established in the trade (p.10).

In Cork, crochet began as crochet. The style that settled into Clones did not come from Cork and then change: it was different from the beginning because it began in Kilcullen as a needlelace variation. The style then spread to other centres via initiatives set up by the wives of Church of Ireland clergymen. Mrs Roberts letter to Meredith (1865, p.371) describes how crochet began in Kilcullen, not as a way of making edgings but from interpreting old lace using a new technique.
You are aware, I doubt not, the work originated here. I have the original piece, that my deeply-lamented sister-in-law brought from a friend of hers in Dover, of course, most inferior in design, not unlike crabs and spiders in succession, attached to each other. She, at that time, had a flourishing trade among her poor neighbours in Polka knitting; but just at the moment she was suddenly taken from us, the demand for Polkas ceased: I then taught five poor women to copy the crochet spiders, and then lent them different pieces of old lace, and of their own ingenuity they brought it to its present perfection. I distributed twenty-eight teachers of it throughout Ireland.

Mrs Roberts does not say if she, like Lady Deane in Cork, learned crochet in order to teach it to her neighbours but it seems likely that she did, since she had no book of patterns or prior knowledge of any pattern and copied the spiders from the piece of crochet she happened to get from her sister-inlaw. The need to work efficiently using available skills, and limited tools and materials presented a problem that was solved by making a hybrid lace from old specimens.

The experience of knitting polka jackets undoubtedly helped the neighbours of Mrs Roberts sister-in-law realise the benefits of producing what the market wanted, and quickly. Therefore, the five poor women did not try to copy Mrs Roberts old lace but reinterpreted it in a newly-fashionable, easily-learned,

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and fast medium. That the source lace included Venetian gros point, or the Spanish version of Venetian raised lace, is suggested by the fact that the known places to which Mrs Roberts sent teachers made a crocheted interpretation of needlelace and not the plain style of crochet that was being made around Cork at that time. Since she sent teachers throughout Ireland it is quite possible that what has become Irish Crochet began when a Kilcullen teacher taught the Venetian style so close to where the Cork style was being made that the two influenced each other. A likeness to the work which bore Mrs. Roberts name is only faintly tracable in that which the districts produce that received her teachers; for each locality soon formed an independent style and retained it (Meredith 1865, p.371). In the Spanish1 version of Venetian raised lace even-weight cords are laid on the surface as gimp, rather than having tapered padding in selective parts of motifs as the Venetian original would have had. The Spanish version, less technically demanding and therefore quicker to make, became the preferred style of lace in the Clones and Roslea area, where Irish Crochet making continued long after it had died out in the other areas influenced by the Kilcullen initiative.

Paludan (1995, p.62) is referring only to the crochet originating in County Kildare when she writes: To begin with, the Italian and Spanish raised needlepoint laces of the late seventeenth century served as models. Meredith (1865, p.16) believes this style, which became known generally as Irish point, was the highest development of crochet lace.
The early specimens of this lace were beautiful pieces of workmanship, comparable to the mediaeval guipures and old points, of continental celebrity; they were, in fact, imitations of them. The attempts to resuscitate their styles, and to rival their reputation, were by no means contemptible. Great aptitude for this revival was displayed (Meredith 1865, p.9).

Pullan (1859, p.99) describes Spanish rose (raised) lace as, very close, elaborate and massive, the edges of the scrolls and ornaments being raised very much.

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Marsland (1853, p.v), the English company which traded with Cork, confirms Maguire (1853, p.211) when its manual records that, at the commencement edgings only were attempted. If Cork makers began by doing edgings, the lengths were certainly not like the Kildare raised crochet that was based on needlepoints, and took great skill to make. The edgings must have been simple and flat, probably similar in style to those in British and European books of the period.

Although their work began in a less technically challenging way than in Kildare, some makers in Cork soon progressed to making more than basic repetitive lengths when (co-operative) division of labour began. Workers found that making motifs separately with extremely fine thread meant each ovoid foundation row could become leaf-like; each flower-like circle was, in effect, a miniature doily, and just as open to improvisation as British designers had realised when making larger-scale doilies and their variants.

The thinking process of the maker is evident in a collar made in Ballingarry (between Limerick and Cork) and acquired in 1853 by the V&A (876-1853). In Figure 4.b the motifs of the collar have been separated out to show the variety of subtly different constructions of the bits.

What is unusual about this collar is that the ground seems to have been made, not simply to connect the bits to each other, but in response to a preexisting lace. By the early 1850s old lace was used as source material in the Cork area and the ground of the Ballingarry collar appears very like coraline lace. One of the defining characteristics of Cork style lace is that some areas of ground are differently spaced from other areas (Figure 4.g). It is possible that Mechlin lace (Figure 4.f) was the source of this style: Honiton, Venetian and Mechlin laces were copied in Cork.

Figures 4.h and 4.i show two collars made in Killeshandra, County Cavan. Stylistically, they are unlike the Ballingarry collar and lappets and illustrate the style initiated by the unnamed five poor women in Kilcullen that is based on the Spanish interpretation of Venetian raised lace.

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Fig.4.b. Collar (V&A 876-1853) of Cork style work from Ballingarry that shows the diversity in the doily improvisation system. There are eleven variations of a motif from a total of fifteen in the collar. The ground is very like that of 4.c, 4.d and 4.e. Fig.4.c. One of a pair of lappets (V&A 1095a-1854) with the motifs highlighted and isolated to show the development in the doilies. The rose motif is a doily variation but with denser petals than later versions. The raised knots on the thistle are unusual.

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Fig.4.d. Coraline lace. 16th century Italian. (Pollen 1908, Plate XXXVIII). Fig.4.e. Cuff. Irish. Unknown date. Possible coraline influence. (Authors collection). Fig.4.f. 18th century Mechlin. Variable weight ground. (Pollen 1908, Plate CI, detail) Fig.4.g. Detail of Irish Crochet coat (Harvey, 1912). Later Cork style large motifs and mixed density grounds; possibly showing influence of Mechlin lace style above.

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Fig.4.h. Section of collar: made in Killeshandra, County Cavan (V&A 1158.1855). Fig.4.i. Section of another Killeshandra collar (V&A 1159.1855). The top collar in particular shows the influence of Venetian raised lace. Comparing the central bow with the bow in Fig.2.g. shows the similarity of source lace for the makers of both reinterpretations and highlights the difference in quality of execution.

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Fig.4.j. 17th century Spanish version of a Venetian style. (Pollen 1908, Plate LIII). Fig.4.k. A section of a collar of what has become known as Clones lace because the industry continued there for longer than in other areas. The photograph shows an extreme version of a style characterised by a dense arrangement of motifs, smaller than those of Cork, and a ground of knotted brides. Outlining the motifs in a thick worked cord is a feature of Spanish lace (Fig.4.j) but it is possible that the technique was adopted just as a matter of expediency: in crochet it is quicker and easier to do than the tapered cords of the Venetian original. (Authors collection).

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Figure 4.c is one of a pair of lappets. The thinking process of the maker can be traced when one lappet is deconstructed. Figure 4.c shows the small changes made between motifs that led to progressively more complicated work. No place of origin is given but the similarity of the ground to the Ballingarry collar and an analysis of the motifs suggest that, despite parts of it being in raised work, it is connected to Cork-style crochet. The raised areas are unlike Venetian rose or gros point: they do not cover cords but appear to be the result of experimenting with 3-dimensional doilies, repeatedly working groups of stitches into the posts of circles instead of into the edge of the previous row. It is possible that the imagery is based on the Honiton lace rose, shamrock and thistle emblems that had been favourites of lace buyers since their use on Queen Victorias wedding clothes in 1840.

4.6

Stylistic characteristics

Traditional Irish Crochet is always made using thread, never yarn, and the motifs are based on organic, naturalistic sources. Three features in particular characterise the style, although not all three have to be used in combination for it to be identified as Irish Crochet. Each characteristic was known in lacemaking before 1845, but was used differently in Irish Crochet. The first, the use of covered cords, not only gives body to the work but also enables a skilful maker to manipulate separate parts of each motif, giving it form. The second is the practice of making lace in parts, to be joined by brides towards the end of the making process. The third feature is the inclusion of raised or 3-dimensional motifs.

The source of the Irish technique of crocheting over a padding cord was, undoubtedly, needlepoint lace which is, almost entirely, buttonhole stitch over thread.

The second feature, separate parts, was not of Irish origin. According to Earnshaw (1984a, p.117), appliqud laces, some bobbin laces and, All needlepoint laces, except hollie point, are non-continuous, or, made in

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sections. Irish workers might have adopted the method after seeing almost any antique lace or the appliqud version of Carrickmacross lace. In Honiton lace, the flowers, or sprigs, are made separately, and sewn on afterwards (Harvey, 1829, p.296). Earnshaw (1985, p.84) writes of the advantage of using the method; a maker all her life might make only one or two designs. This method achieved some semblance of specialization, with increased speed and efficiency of production.

Lace manufacturer Ernest Lefbure (1888, p.305) credits Belgian initiative for making lace as separate flowers and bits of ornament, or in segments analogous to those used in the needlepoint lace process. Kraatz (1989, p.120) describes how an earlier Lefbure, August, organised his French workshop:
Lefbure was a man of modern times, for he understood that division of labour was the key to achieving production sufficiently intensive to meet the demand, and sufficiently flexible to respond rapidly to changes of fashion. The young workers were very specialized. Some made only the solid areas of design, others only the decorative fillings or raised outlines, others again the reseau.

Three-dimensional needlelace is most associated with seventeenth century stumpwork, and metal thread shoe roses but the rarity of both in the nineteenth century suggests that they are unlikely sources for the threedimensional elements of Irish Crochet. Warren and Pullan (1855) give a pattern, made some time after the first Irish raised rose, which includes a layered flower that looks similar, but is made differently: progressively smaller rounds are made separately and afterwards the layers are sewed together. The Irish method is more time-efficient, and less fiddly for motifs that might comprise eight layers tapering from 2.5 cm to 1 cm diameter. It is unlikely that the rose shown (in Fig.4.c) could have been visualised in advance of first making it. Almost certainly, it was first made by someone experimenting while crocheting.

Although the styles of crochet that originated in Cork and Kilcullen later adopted elements from each other, work from different areas remains distinguishable. Cork lace tends to have larger motifs, widely spaced on a

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plain or picoted crochet net ground that can vary in density in different areas (Fig.4.g). Irish Crochet derived from the Kilcullen original is likely to have more, and smaller, motifs that are outlined with cordonnet, and a ground decorated with knots (Fig.4.k). Knotted grounds in lace are unusual but not exclusive to Irish Crochet lace: Palliser (1881, Plate IX) shows a sixteenth or seventeenth century Genoese lace with knotted brides (V&A 611-1853).

4.7

Mademoiselle Elonore Riego de la Branchardire

Irish Crochet is probably the most difficult to learn of all the types of crochet and it takes considerable time and aptitude to become proficient at the craft. Using the same pattern, no two makers of Irish Crochet will produce exact replicas of the original design. There will be differences because of variations in thread and tension but mainly because each maker has her own system for adjusting the padding or packing cord (after every few stitches) while making, and this controls how the motif looks and lies when complete. At all stages, the worker must use her own discretion and should not for one moment hesitate to follow her own artistic instinct if she feels inclined to make changes to the given pattern.
Now it is this very freedom, so fascinating to the worker, which creates such difficulties to a writer upon Irish crochet. if minute directions for fillings could be written, they would be so extremely intricate that to attempt to follow them would drive most workers distracted (Harvey, in Priscilla, 1912).

Mlle Riego found that she too had trouble writing instructions for the lace she made that was based on the same source lace as that used by the Kilcullen women. Instructions for making a childs dress, exhibited at the 1851 Great Exhibition, covered more than twenty large, magazine pages1. Directions for Raised Crochet Spanish Point Lace (Figure 4.r), a copy of a valuable

The Needle. Published monthly from July 1852 to December 1854. Simpkin, Marshall & Co., Ackerman & Co., London. The instructions for the dress began with Issue 7, Volume II, January 1853, continued in Issues 8-11, and finished in Issue 13, Volume III, July 1853.

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specimen (1886, Introduction), that she showed at the 1855 international Paris exhibition, took her five years of spare time to write.

Previous sections have shown that Irish makers did not experience similar problems: they neither recorded patterns as text nor followed written instructions. They learned technique from each other and copied samples that others had made, or devised their own. In 1886, Mlle Riego indirectly acknowledges the design skills of Irish Crochet makers:
The Countess of Aberdeen, in her most interesting and practical guide to the Irish womens industries, now on view at the Edinburgh Exhibition remarks: It is impossible to spend even a few weeks in Ireland without being struck by the great ingenuity, the power of adaption, the natural skill in working out designs, and the patience shown in the work itself (1886, Introduction).

Yet, strangely, in the last paragraph of that same page of The Irish Lace Instructor, she writes:
For I may claim that all this class of work owes its origins to my early books, as Crochet Lace did not exist before the publication of my first one on that subject, which appeared in 1846, about the time of the dreadful famine in Ireland. With the help I then gave, the poor of that country soon learnt my new lace as it was then called; schools and classes were formed

Mlle Riegos claim has been repeated by many writers. Needlecraft magazine ([c.1910], Issue 21, p.3), for example, referring to Mlle Riego, calls Irish Crochet her invention and Her lace:
The inventor of [crochet lace] was Mademoiselle Riego de la Blanchardiere, [sic] who discovered that a particular kind of antique Spanish needlepoint lace could be most effectively copied in crochet. About the year 1846 she published instructions for a few patterns, which, after the distress caused by the great potato famine, were used by many ladies of high position for teaching the work to classes and schools

This section examines the veracity of Mlle Riegos words because, if it is true that Irish makers based their work on her designs, a core premise of this thesis is weakened. The hypothesis is; early Irish Crochet lace makers did not use printed patterns: they demonstrated that a facility with crochet technique initiated inventiveness (in Kilcullen) and creativity (in Cork).

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Official documents provide some verifiable information about Mlle Riego. 1851 census records show she was born in Paris in 1828. She was a medal winner at the Exhibitions in London in 1851 and Paris in 1855. In the early 1860s, she took a case to court. When she died in 1887, she left almost 6000 to poor Irish female workers (quoted in Ballantyne 2007b, p.19).

Apart from these facts, most of the rest of what is known about Mlle Riego is revealed by her books of patterns and the magazine that was under her direction. These show that she was an accomplished designer and prolific publisher of patterns on knitting, tatting, crochet, needlepoint and embroidery1. She taught, had a needlework supply business, was a manufacturer of some of her own materials, endorsed others products, printed her own magazine and offered to have Lace cleaned, mended and rearranged (The Needle, September 1852). Mlle Riegos 1886 claim, that Crochet Lace did not exist before the publication of my first [book] on that subject, was originally made in 1852:
previous to my publication in 1845 only the plain stitch of crochet was known, and I confidently assert that Crochet and Point Lacet especially owe their invention and advancement to my exertion (The Needle, (1), p.1).

Chapter 3 showed that Mrs Gaugain, Miss Lambert and others had included more than the plain stitch of crochet in the books they wrote that pre-dated Mlle Riegos first book (1846, not 1845 as claimed above). The 1846 books of crochet by Mrs Mee showed stitches engraved accurately enough for them to be read, enabling her to produce patterns that could be described as crochet lace: marking the point at which the nature of crochet changed. Mlle Riegos 1846 needlework book illustrated the crochet patterns with simple graphed charts: there is nothing in her first book to justify her claim that she invented crochet and Irish Crochet.

Her 1886 book, Orris Lace lists 67 of her books (Potter, 1955): she claimed to have written more than a hundred, although it is possible she included in this number each of the thirty editions of The Needle magazine, since each magazine contained more patterns than many of her books.

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Contemporaneous authorities within Ireland; Maguire, Meredith and Lindsey, never mention her name. A rare reference to her is in the book published by Marsland, the company who traded with producers around Cork, when they write (1853, p.vi) that their reason for publishing needlework patterns is that designers, - including Mlle Riego who was preoccupied at that time with publishing her monthly magazine - cannot keep up with the demand for patterns from every part of the kingdom. Marsland, unusually, gave permission for these designs to be worked for sale: although there is no evidence that any of them were made in Ireland. If Irish lace makers had wanted to sell work based on the designs of Mlle Riego, or any other person, they would have needed permission, both to print the paper instructions and to attach a registration label to any finished goods. There is no record of either of these things ever happening.

From the earliest days of printed pattern books, plagiarism was a problem; especially, internationally: British copyright law did not cover America, for example. Miss Lamberts experience is typical of many:
Without alluding to numerous petty piracies, the writer cannot refrain from noticing the reprint of this treatise in America as an original work, dedicated to the ladies of the United States: a circumstance she is fain to accept as a compliment, as there is no redress for the substantial wrong. To imitators at home, it may be as well to hint, that all the designs in this volume are copyright (1846, preface).

The Philadelphia Library details an extreme example1:

This book is an exact reprint of an anonymous English work called The Lady's Own Book. The publishers claimed it was written by the popular American novelist Ann Stephens in order to obtain U.S. copyright. When identical plates began to appear in Godey's Lady's Book, the magazine was suspected of piracy, but its editors replied that their plates were copied from the English original. In the absence of international copyright, both parties were acting within the law, but neither was entirely honest.

An exhibition label referring to Stephens A. S., 1854. The Ladies' Complete Guide to Crochet, Fancy Knitting, and Needlework, Dick & Fitzgerald, New York. th http://www.librarycompany.org/HookBook/case7labels.htm Accessed 10 July 2011.

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Mlle Riego seems to have been obsessive about copyright infringements and registering her designs1. Sometimes she tactfully warned her readers:
Ladies are respectfully informed that these articles cannot be purchased without the registered mark being affixed; and parties wishing to manufacture them for the purposes of sale, must have the Authoresss permission (1848a);

and sometimes less tactfully: I must direct the attention of those of my readers competent to understand the many plagiarisms ... (1848b, preface). She began publishing in magazine format to counteract wholesale piracy of her work and took a case to court in 1862 to have a clause in the Art Copyright Act, 186 clarified.

Given that she was rigorous about enforcing rules of copyright and registration, it seems likely that she would have taken action against Irish makers had they been selling work made using her designs. In fact, Irish makers had similar concerns:
new and artistic designs should not only be encouraged by extended patronage, but be specially protected by law. those engaged in the manufacture require some simple protective law to prevent their outlay and expenditure being ruthlessly appropriated. (Lindsey 1883, p.11)

The penalties for infringing copyright and the evidence for Irish ingenuity, militate against Irish makers plagiarising Mlle Riegos, or anyones, designs. There are no pattern books by Mlle Riego or her contemporaries in the collection of the National Library of Ireland: of the two Riego books held in Trinity College, Dublin, one was published in 1886, the other in 1887, the year of her bequest. The connection of Mlle Riego with Irish Crochet seems to have begun only in the 1880s; her 1886 Irish Lace Instructor and the bequest appear to be linked to her friendship in the 1880s with Irish lace

To the extent that a reviewer of her work at the 1851 Great Exhibition wrote that she cannot quite understand on what principle the lady registers designs of convolvuluses and other flowers, having hitherto believed that Nature alone could claim the monopoly of the invention, and that if two people both attempted to copy the same species of flowers, one or both must be very stupid indeed if they did not accomplish something very much alike. It would be paying the lady a very bad compliment to suppose her flowers were so unlike Nature as to require a registration. Illustrated Exhibitor, (1-8), July September 1851, John Cassell, London, p.331.

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designer Michael Holland (Ballantyne 2007b); who was asked by her if he could get Irish workers to make copies of the Spanish Point design1 illustrated in Figure 4.r. Given that Mlle Riego did not invent Irish Crochet, a question remains; why does some of her work look so like Irish Crochet that the two are mistaken in museum lace collections and in lace experts books?

Chapter 2 showed how in lacemaking it is common practice to base new work on pre-existing styles and to give them the names of high-status laces. Mlle Riego followed in that tradition. In her first all-crochet book (1847, preface) she writes, the patterns are designed from the picturesque costumes of past times ... although, because the technique is so different, they bore little resemblance to the laces after which they were named.

In the first issue of The Needle (July 1852) Mlle Riego expressed her intention that The designs given, will, in many instances, have an historical value as representing Arabian, Turkish, Saracenic, Gothic, Classical, and Medival periods; and more recently the Renaissance, Elizabethan, and Mixed modern styles. It would be difficult to do work that Mlle Riego had not appropriated, and helps explain why she believed her work was being plagiarised or that others had used her work as source material, when, in fact, they had simply gone to the same original source as she had. At the same time, she feels free to use any Mixed modern styles she chooses. She did this extensively and, like most teachers, was able to draw on a wide range of others styles. What is of specific interest here is her use of Honiton lace.

From a fragment of a letter in the Power Correspondence (U086.11) in Cork City and County Archives.

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Fig.4.l. Section of parasol classified as Irish Crochet (V&A 162-1892) but which is from Riego (1848c) and displays a Honiton lace influence. Fig.4.m. Section of collar (Riego 1848c) La Rose, which became 4.l. above. The illustration also shows why Riegos books helped popularise crochet in the 1840s: stitches could be read from illustrations instead of text. Fig.4.n. Section (p.15) of 6 pages of text for the above collar. Irish makers never needed to work through text like this. (4.m & 4.n from photographs of Riego 1848c in the collection of the National Art Library, V&A, London (Box 1.43.E)).

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Fig.4.o. Riego design from The Needle (August 1853) often mistaken for Irish Crochet both as a blouse front (here) and when rearranged as a collar (1853, 13th Series). (Illustration from Turnbull 1904, Trinity College Dublin collection). Fig.4.p. Section from a collar of unknown origin which is neither Irish Crochet nor a Riego design but seems to have links to Honiton lace. (Authors collection).

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Fig.4.q. Riego (1847, p.20) collar Point dEspagne. Commonly, new patterns were named after famous pre-existing, high value styles even though they bore no resemblance to the original. (Reworked illustration from Antique Pattern Library collection). Fig.4.r. Riegos first design that copies the Irish Crochet makers technique of using a worked cord as gimp. The work won her a medal at the 1855 Paris exhibition, was first published in 1856 and republished in her 1886 Irish Lace Instructor. (Riego 1886, Plate III, National Art Library collection).

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Mrs Wheelers (1847) Honiton lace pattern was Honiton in name only. Mrs Warrens (1848, p.372) Honiton collar was closer to the original: sprigs were crocheted separately and sewn to a crocheted or bobbinet base. Earlier that year, Eureka, who lived in Devon, sixteen miles from Honiton, published a pattern for a collar where not only the technique - making sprigs individually but the motifs too, were based on the Honiton style. In the Preface to the first of the two editions, written in February and April 1848, she recommends the laces novelty, As Crochet Lace Sprigs have not hitherto been attempted. It is not known if Mlle Riego saw Eurekas book, but she, soon afterwards, adopted the Honiton technique of making separate sprigs, and the look of Honiton motifs. Although she calls her Crochet Appliqu an entirely new style of crochet, in the Preface (written in June) to her 1848b book, the only differences from what had already been made were that she recommended coloured silk threads be used for her sprigs, and that they should be attached to a solid fabric. The Honiton connection was stated more obviously in her design for a Crochet Honiton collar (1849a): nine cornflower sprigs were to be made separately and applied to net that had a border of joined cornflowers. Another collar in the same book featured the rose, shamrock and thistle emblems, typically associated with Honiton lace.

Geometric eccentricity is a distinguishing feature of the Honiton rose and its appearance among the crochet appliqu sprays (1848b) reveals Mlle Riegos source: (Irish Crochet roses, in contrast, are always symmetrical). Mlle Riego uses a Honiton rose and other distinctive Honiton motifs in the patterns for both collars in her next (1848c) book and many more designs made during the following few years. One of the sprigs in the 1848c book was adapted to suit being made into a parasol cover1 (Fig.4.l) that is now in the Irish Crochet collection of the V&A (162-1892).

Shown to the author on 4 September 2010 as part of the museums Irish Crochet collection and described as Irish by Alan S. Cole, 1895, Supplemental Descriptive Catalogue of Specimens of Lace Acquired for the South Kensington Museum Between June 1890 and June 1895, Her Majesty's Stationery Office, London.

th

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If flowers and organic shapes are made as motifs or sprigs in thread crochet it is inevitable that there will be unintentional stylistic similarities by different makers. A Riego design for a blouse front, (The Needle, August 1853) that was also published as a collar (Riego 1853), has been mistaken for Irish Crochet by the Ulster Folk and Transport Museum (1975.445) and several lace experts. Neither H. J. Yallop, whose PhD subject was Honiton lace, nor Pat Earnshaw link the lace with Mlle Riego but believe it to be Irish Crochet imitating Honiton. Earnshaw (1984b, Illustration 154), after labelling the work Irish crochet because of the raised roses and picoted brides, writes, here it copies Honiton to some extent. Yallop (1992, Illustration 73), identifies the design as Imitation Honiton Irish crochet. Unfortunately, Yallop gives no information about imitation Honiton crochet and in the course of this research the author has seen few references to it; suggesting very little was made or, perhaps, that it is being inadvertently stored as Irish Crochet, rather than with English or Riego collections.

The apparent overlap between Irish Crochet, Honiton and the work of Mlle Riego reinforces the concept of all lace being interconnected while maintaining unique features. It is possible that some Irish Crochet makers saw Mlle Riegos work and it affected theirs. Honiton, Mechlin and Valenciennes are named influences: there are obvious connections with Venetian and Spanish lace, and, less obviously, with coraline and Genoese. There is currently no evidence that Irish women saw Mlle Riegos work, other than the three who were given answers to queries on her Notice to Correspondents pages of The Needle (Issues 2, 4, 17). What one answer reveals is that Mlle Riego was fully aware of Irish makers work. In answer to an unspecified question from Erin she wrote:
The work is not made from any direction, being composed from ovals, rounds, squares, flowers, and leaves, worked in close crochet; these pieces arranged without any design, sewn together, or joined by bars. The best kind made in Ireland, is excellently worked, and has a very good effect, but it is an error to suppose that it is an imitation of old point lace, the chief beauty of which consisted in the artistic character of the designs (Issue No.17, November 1853. p.218).

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This answer adds to the argument already presented and confirms that Mlle Riego did not invent Irish Crochet. Given the perfect opportunity to reveal if Irish women were using her designs, she makes it clear that she knew they were working from no patterns (direction). She knows of work that consists of simple shapes joined haphazardly: (Cork crochet). She refers to another kind, (Kilcullen style) the best kind, which is excellently worked and looks good, but which fails to match the original point lace in that the overall layout (design) was not, in her opinion, artistically arranged.

It is, perhaps, reasonable to imagine that Mlle Riego decided to make her new style raised Spanish Point (Figure 4.r), which is artistically well laid out, and in which she crocheted over cord for the first time, after seeing Kilcullenstyle Irish Crochet. She clearly associated the design with Ireland; reconfiguring it for publication in the Irish Lace Instructor (1886). It is pure supposition, but tempting, to think that she left her fortune to Irish lace makers when she died in 1887 because she felt indebted to them: the original version of the design helped her win a prize medal at the 1855 Paris exhibition.

4.8

The collapse of the industry

Many Irish lace schools closed within a few years of forming: of the twenty private lace schools that employed Normal Lace School teachers between 1844 and 1854, for example, just eight were still operating in 1865. Lindseys 1883 map (Figure 4.a) shows that lacemaking had already ended in more than half the places (marked by blue dots) where it had existed previously.

Meredith believed the tedium of lacemaking did not suit the Irish temperament. Nor would Irish women compete with women in other countries to make needle and bobbin laces, knowing their contribution was, with

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machine-made lace, driving down the value of lace in a satiated market1. In Ireland, distaste for doing poorly-paid repetitive work meant, The hands dropped off from the work, before the work dropped off from them (Meredith 1865, p.374).

Another reason given for failure was that merchants who found markets for lace in the early days were joined within a few years by mere speculators, (Meredith 1865, p.11) who, taking advantage of cheap Irish labour and a buoyant market, allowed sub-standard Irish work to threaten the livelihoods of all the makers. Buyers looked elsewhere for better quality lace. Palliser attributes the depression in the trade to the impossibility of competing with inferior and machine-made lace (1869, p.385). In Merediths opinion (1865, pp.36, 47), the industrys collapse was primarily the fault of the system of education, which gives no special information on the subject of those industrial employments, that are likely to be useful.

If making lace were intended to provide permanent, well-paid employment for women then Meredith (1865, p.2) is right in saying some attempts were utter failures, and others but partially successful. If, however, lacemaking were intended to help individuals and communities through famine and its aftermath then lacemaking was very successful. It was no coincidence that The districts in which this movement [to emigrate] was strongest were those in which the lace trade was most active (p.40). Because of it, Ireland was unusual among emigrating nations in having as many women as men leave the country, and a disproportionate number of single women2. The money sent home to relatives by emigrants enabled families to survive. Other families, whose only income was from lacemaking, were protected from hunger and misery by the fingers of the feeble child, and saved from the workhouse by her cheerful and untiring toil (Maguire 1853, p.204). Meredith
1

English bobbin-lace makers had reduced sales when Irish lace was sold through charitable agencies (Earnshaw, 1985). Tonna (1844, pp. 130-135) describes the dreadful conditions under which Nottingham lacemakers lived: children were given opium to sedate them while mothers and older children slaved. Young women were expected to supplement their meagre wages by prostitution. 2 Between 1849 and 1859, 569,036 women emigrated from Ireland (Meredith 1865, p.39).

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confirms that When mens hands were useless, little girls fingers, by means of this lace-work, provided for families while the famine lasted (1865, p.17).

For most Irish women lacemaking was a means to an end and, with few exceptions, was abandoned when alternative, more lucrative employment became available in Ireland and in the countries to which the Irish emigrated. Textiles making has always been an exploitative industry in which people have been little more than machine parts. The uncertainty of making a living from volatile employment that was dependent on political decisions, the marketing skills of others, patronage, the vagaries of fashion and competition from other makers and machines, contributed to its early abandonment.

4.9

The worldwide legacy

In the early years of the twentieth century there were many more people making Irish Crochet outside Ireland than in Ireland. By copying and reinterpreting the early style of Irish Crochet, other countries helped preserve a more artistic version than was made by many in Ireland after the nineteenth century. Much of what was then made in Ireland was the repetitive, stylised form of crochet known as bb. This has characteristics of early Irish Crochet, including the three-dimensional rose, but does not have the individuality of work made in earlier decades.

When the fishing catch failed in Brittany from 1903, women made Irish Crochet which became, in a slightly modified form, the traditional lace (Kraatz 1989, p.184). As a famine relief measure, lacemaking helped the community through difficult times, but the fashion for heavy, handmade lace, was short-lived because of overproduction and the need for simpler clothes by the increasing numbers of working women. During the same decade Irish crochet was the height of fashion in Vienna and among the Czechs (Paludan 1995, p.69):

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Among the most fashionable articles of our time is undoubtedly Irish crochet, a form of crochet done for many years in most regions of Erz Gebirge. This kind of crochet has recently reached such a high standard, that Irish crochet made in Austria is in far greater demand than the genuine article indeed, the difference between the two can no longer be distinguished (p.69, caption, quoting the catalogue of an Austrian company that made Irish Crochet).

Crochet lace made in the village of Csetnek in Hungary after 1905, and recently revived, traces its roots back to Irish lace1. In the early twentieth century newly arrived Italian immigrants to America made Irish Crochet to earn a pittance (five cents an hour), until they found more lucrative work2. It was also made later in Asia, in Pakistan and in China (Kraatz 1989, p.185).

Surprisingly, no books of Irish Crochet patterns were published in the nineteenth century although the ten doilies in Mrs Beetons (1870) book resemble the style. Mlle Riegos patterns, even the ones in her Irish Lace Instructor (1886) can be discounted because they were originally published as Spanish Point or laces derived from non-Irish sources, were not used by the Irish makers and do not resemble the hybrid style then being made that subsequently came to be known as Irish Crochet. It was the revival of interest in point dIrlande by Paris fashion designers in the early twentieth century that seems to have prompted the publication of the first Irish Crochet pattern books: Madame Hardouins six volumes (n.d. but c.1905) and the DMC book edited by Thrse de Dillmont (n.d but c.1905). A plethora of similar publications followed in England and America. Needlecraft (c.1910), Hadley (1911), Priscilla (Harvey, 1912; Taylor, 1912), Klickmann (c.1912) and Brown (1913), appeared during the following decade. These publications contain a mix of pre-existing Irish Crochet motifs and newly designed variations, and have not only affected what is perceived to be traditional Irish Crochet but have contributed significantly to the success of the current revival of interest in the craft. Regular communal online crochet-alongs are based on motifs from the books, freely downloadable, via the internet3.

1 2

http://www.csetnekicsipke.hu/en/indexen.htm Accessed 10th July 2011. th Where Irish Lace Comes From, New York Times, 19 May 1912. 3 http://www.antiquepatternlibrary.org/html/warm/main.htm Accessed 10th July 2011.

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Today, a few large companies produce nearly all the worlds lace1, or rather, reproduce, since most resembles pre-existing machine-made lace. Fashion designers will periodically feature lace: John Rochas collection for Spring/Summer 2010, for example, incorporated rigid crochet; but it was Pradas use of Venetian-style lace in their Fall/Winter 2008 collection that seems to have revived interest in lace as a fashion fabric2. There is a collectors market in old lace3. The tourist industry promotes hand lacemaking in areas that once had a thriving lace industry: Burano and Malta, for example. In Clones, government support and the enthusiasm of a few local women have helped rejuvenate the craft.

Designs in the regular Irish Crochet special editions of the Russian-language Duplet4 and Mod5 magazines are taken directly from the out-of-copyright 1912 Priscilla publications. Ukrainian makers Antonina Kuznetsova6 and Miroslava Gorokhovich7 are just two makers who are showing the creative potential of early twentieth century Irish Crochet patterns; combining them with the vivid colours and tape laces associated with the traditional crafts of Eastern Europe. The exuberance of early Irish Crochet is evident in their work rather than the designed symmetry of the 1880s and later. The creative freedom allowed by the Cork technique appeals to freeformers8, while its attraction to others is crochets facility to visually express the mathematical concepts inherent in hyperbolic geometry9. The latter group use crochet to either create 3-dimensional shapes that can be visualised but are difficult to describe in text or mathematical notation, or use it to create previously unimagined shapes that evolve during the making process. They have recently begun doing, in effect, what the first Irish Crochet makers did in the mid nineteenth century; with the advantage that modern makers have
1 2

www.sakae-lace.co.jp/en Accessed 10th July 2011. Article by Christina Binkley, New Life for the Historic Art of Lace-Making. Wall Street th Journal, 5 April 2011, p.8. http://online.wsj.com Accessed 10th July 2011. 3 http://www.mendes.co.uk/index.html and others, including eBay. Accessed 10th July 2011. 4 http://www.etsy.com/shop/lado http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGguJG1pbU8 Accessed 10th July 2011. 5 th http://www.etsy.com/shop/lado?section_id=5114437 Accessed 10 July 2011. 6 th http://www.crochetinsider.com/interview/antonina-kuznetsova Accessed 10 July 2011. 7 http://www.flickr.com/photos/34932897@N07 8 http://www.freeformcrochet.com/2009/Pages/main.html 9 http://theiff.org/lectures/05a.html

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fewer material and colour constraints and no obligation that the finished work be functional or sellable.

Had Irish lace been professionally designed in the 1840s and 1850s, it could have resembled Lefbures too perfect lace. The naivety and

unselfconsciousness of untrained designers is what gave Irish Crochet its individuality; a quality that is lost when the designer is not the maker or the making process is mechanistic. Today, online communities are preserving, teaching and extending interest in the traditional Irish Crochet for which patterns were published in the early twentieth century. It is makers such as those in Ukraine and the ones creating the unique, crocheted, hyperbolic coral reef1, who have captured the essence of Irish Crochets contribution to to textile innovation.

http://www.sciencegallery.com/crochetcoralreef

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