Laces of Ipswich

Cover, The Laces of Ipswich, with costumed interpreter.

I recently read a fascinating book on a aspect of New England textile history new to me.  In the mid-18th century women in Ipswich, a town on the north shore of Boston, Massachusetts, established a very successful cottage industry in lace-making. At the height of production, 600 lace makers created pillow lace, making edgings for bonnets and shawls.  This wasn't a recreational hobby but rather provided much needed additional income for the lace maker's household. We are lucky in researcher and author Marta Cotterell Raffel, who dug deep and is an engaging writer too. 

In 1791 Ipswich resident Reverend Joseph Dana prepared a report for businessman and senator George Cabot on the lace industry in Ipswich. The report, with thirty-six small samples of lace, was ultimately submitted to Alexander Hamilton, eager to assess industries in the new country as imports from Britain were curtailed or halted altogether.  Eventually the samples became part of the Library of Congress collections, where they have been expertly conserved to this day. The image below is from the Library of Congress website.

https://www.loc.gov/resource/mss24612.003_0347_0460/?sp=19&r=-0.096,-0.064,1.111,0.715,0

The book has a valuable glossary, images of lace samples, portraits of New England women wearing the lace, and a bibliography. Modern day lace makers have reproduced some of the historic patterns. An appendix shows several of these recreated samples with their corresponding pattern, called a "pricking".  Below is a detail of an Ipswich lace with its associated "pricking". The lace maker inserted her pins into the holes of the pricking, and wove around the pins, using linen or silk thread wound onto her bobbins.

 

https://americanhistory.si.edu/blog/ipswich-lace

 

It's important to note the lace produced is not the highly refined lace produced by women in Irish convents or trained by lace schools in Europe.  Such imported lace was a luxury item and embellished the clothing and accessories of women of highest social status.  The lace makers of Ipswich, who learned from each other, were producing lace edgings affordable by middle-class women - the wives of merchants and other businessmen, for example. 

With the advent of machine-made lace this once-valued textile lost some of its exclusivity and allure, and the making of Ipswich lace ceased about 1840, although a few practitioners continue until the end of the century.  There was a bit of a revival in the 1920's as part of the general Colonial Revival movement, when antiquarians such as Wallace Nutting recreated a rather romantic vision of colonial life through staged photography.  One major contribution of this revival was the preservation of colonial artifacts and renewed appreciation of the skills demonstrated.

 

Recreation of Ipswich lace edging, with "pricking" pattern.

The Laces of Ipswich: The Art and Economics of an Early American Industry, 1750-1840.

ISBN 1-58465-163-6

Happy Holidays and Best Wishes for 2023

 

Morning after a snowfall at Koishikawa, Hokusai, c. 1832. woodblock print.

Thank you so much for reading my blog. 

Best wishes for a happy and healthy 2023 to you and your family.

For more about this image ( and to  view at a larger scale), see https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/A_1927-0613-0-13

Jordan Nassar tatreez embroidery

Tatreez design by Jordan Nassar, stitched by me.

From an article in Selvedge magazine, I learned about the work of Palestinian-American Jordan Nassar, who works in a contemporary form of traditional Palestinian embroidery called tatreez. For the London cultural center The Mosaic Rooms he created a down-loadable tatreez pattern.  One of the colorways suggested was magenta and orange on black canvas. I liked this very much, so decided to stitch it using DMC pearl cotton number 8 in colors 600 (magenta) and 741 (orange-y yellow) on a piece of 15" x 18"  14-count Aida cloth. 

 

Pattern.

 

I printed out the material from The Mosaic Rooms and added center guidelines, in red pen, to the pattern. 

In progress.

I basted center line guidelines first and popped the canvas into a Q-snap embroidery frame, seen above, and started stitching from the center outwards, counting extremely carefully.

Outer border completed.

Close-up of stitching.

The back, in progress.

I found it useful to sometimes tack down thread using drafting tape, a low-tack, low-residue tape. This allowed me to change or amend my stitching before tying off.

 

Finished - back view.

 

The finished embroidery was expertly mounted by textile conservators ConText Inc.  Before framing I will add an indelible label to the back of the mounting stating the designer's name.  Credit where credit is due.

Jordan Nassar - Palestinian embroidery at the ICA Boston

Lament of the Field, detail.

Recently, DH and I journeyed to the booming Seaport area of Boston to see Jordan Nassar - Fantasy and Truth at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA)  Boston, on view through January 29, 2023. 

The exhibit features embroidery made monumental.  From the wall text:

 

Jordan Nassar (b. 1985 in New York) is a multidisciplinary Palestinian-American artist who works in traditional Palestinian craft.  His embroideries, many of which he creates in collaboration with craftswomen in Ramallah, Hebron, and Bethlehem, combine regional motifs with imagined landscapes.   A self-taught artist, Nassar is know for his use of Palestinian tatreez (a form of cross-stitch embroidery), through which colors, patterns, and designs distinguish a wearer both by their origins and their social or familial status, and can signal different stages of life.   A thousands-of-years-old tradition, tatreez has strong ties to Palestinian nostalgia, nationality, and heritage.

Gallery overview.

The exhibit occupies one gallery and also features Nassar's forays into wood marquetry and glass bead manipulation, but for me it's all about the stitching, which utilizes cotton embroidery floss on cotton cloth.  The panels featuring traditional motifs are "interrupted" by stitched landscapes, through which Nassar succeeds in expanding this tradition into a modern cultural expression. The traditional panels and the landscapes play off each other as foils; each made livelier by the adjacency of the other. Each traditional panel features four analogous colors while the landscape panels introduce complementary hues and additional colors not seen elsewhere.

 

The titles of the two works are from a book of poetry, A Tear and A Smile by Lebanese-American author Gibran Khalil Gibran (1883-1931),

Song of the Flowers, 2022.

Lament of the Field, 2022.

Viewers give some idea of the scale of these panels.

 

Detail, landscape panel, Song of the Flowers.

Close-up of cross-stitching, Song of the Flowers.

The motifs in the more traditional panels have specific meanings or references but these were not identified in the exhibit. At the end of this blog I've listed some books which give more information on tatreez, which the UN has designated as an Intangible Cultural Heritage.

Detail, Song of the Flowers.

Detail, Lament of the Field.

Detail, Lament of the Field.

Detail, Lament of the Field.

By varying the color within  motifs - Nassar's signature style - curvilinear patterns can be created, as in the moon above, and its counterpart, the sun, below.

 

Detail, Song of the Flowers.

To learn more about Palestinian embroidery:

(Note - some of the books are out of print and/or hard to source.)

 

Ghnaim, Wafa. Tea and Tatreez. 

Kamel, Widad. Threads of Identity.

Skinner, Margarita. Palestinian Embroidery Motifs: A Treasury of Stitches.

Weir, Shelagh. Palestinian Embroidery.