Historical information

At just 20.6cm in lace length and 27.5cm wide, this section of Torchon machine made lace is quite possibly a sampler for future purchases being a mixture of edging and insertion pieces.

Torchon lace is a bobbin lace which is coarse and strong and was made all over Europe a characteristic of which was that the design and the ground were made in one continuous piece as opposed to motifs joined by brides.

In 1809 John Heathcoat created a machine made net which didn’t unravel when cut and by 1870 every type of hand made lace had a machine made copy. Hand made lace as an industry virtually disappeared by 1900 and these machine made pieces were comparatively cheap.

Significance

The Amess family owned Churchill Island from 1872 to 1929. This lace collection was owned and contributed to by four generations of Amess women.

Physical description

Cheap Torchon machine lace

Inscriptions & markings

Packaged with note: "Scraps of lace found jumbled with this collection"