NAME THAT LACE: Amber Butchart's Stitch In Time

The BBC's miniseries A Stitch in Time is a treat for anyone interested in historical costuming.  Fashion historian Amber Butchart "explores the lives of historical figures through the clothes they wore," aided by historical costumer Ninya Mikhaila.  Amber selects a work of art with an interesting garment, and Ninya and her team recreate it using authentic methods, while Amber studies the person, the era, et cetera.  In the end, Amber (lucky girl!) gets to wear the newly made clothing! 

BBC screen cap from Episode 2: Arnolfini

In addition to getting to wear cool historical recreations, Amber Butchard has interesting fashion sense in her daily wear.  Her outfits are composed of various historical-inspired pieces, combined in interesting ways: she wears what she likes in combinations that appeal to her, and I love it!  I don't love every item, but I love the overall look. 

In Episode 2 (Arnolfini), Amber Butchard wears a velvet capelet with a handmade lace collar sewn to it.  The screencap I opened the post with shows the whole top.  There's actually not much mystery about the name of this lace: it's tatting! 

Shh... Don't tell YouTube this is a BBC thing or they'll take it down and then where would Americans get our British TV fix?!

TATTING AND ITS (FEW) IMITATIONS

Frivolité (tatting), by Rodrigo.Argenton [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], from Wikimedia Commons

With its densely clustered loops and curls and its lack of identifiable pictures or motifs, tatting is super distinctive among hand-made laces.  The lace is made by tying half-hitches onto a loop of thread, then pulling the loop closed, creating a ring.  You can also make bars (lines) to connect loops to each other.  But that's about it for the shapes... therefore, with a limited vocabulary of shapes, tatted pieces all have a similar look.

Tatted lace is usually denser both visually and texturally.  Visually, it has all its elements clustered close together.  There is no interplay of ground and motif; it's all the same.  And because it's made with tight half-hitches around tightened loops, it has a certain weight and inflexibility compared to other laces.  Tatting makes great doileys, cuffs and collars, but doesn't drape nicely for a whole dress. 

Tatting is rarely replicated in machine-made laces.  Sometimes I'll see a machine-made lace edging with loops and picots that imitates a tatted trim, but I have never seen machine-made lace that mimicked tatting on a larger scale.  The elaborate curlicued designs of tatted doileys and collars are sometimes done in machine embroidery, but that's on fabric not on its own, so it isn't lace.  This is puzzling to me... if they can get machines to imitate complex bobbin laces and needlelaces, with grounds and bars and floral motifs and even words, why not do the same for tatting? 

I am confident that Amber Butchard's tatted collar is hand-tatted, not a machine imitation.  What I really want to know is whether it was designed to be a collar at all!  It looks like it was clumsily cut down the front opening, and not evenly!  (I spent the whole episode going "Ooh, nice wool--why is her collar crooked?!  Pretty painting--grr... that collar.")  The left side in this picture looks frayed and small, while the right looks like it's been folded under to enclose the raw edges.  But if the thing was tatted as a ring and not a collar, then why would someone making it a collar cut it off-center like that?  Why not make the cut in the valley between two of those wheel shapes, or down the largest part of a wheel?  I'm not opposed to cutting a doiley if it makes it usable, but what a place to make the snip!

She's been framed!

Giving the benefit of the doubt to the re-maker, perhaps the lace was damaged in some way, and the cut had to be made there.  If by so doing they made a damaged lace usable again, and created this lovely capelet that gives pleasure to its wearer and its viewer, then it was worth it! 

CLICK to see the video on YouTube!