Progress in my Project on Fabric Manipulation. Inspirations, Smocking with Beads, Learning Shadow Quilting.

My idea for this section was to make an object that combined a lot of different surface textures. I chose, as the basic shape for this, a box with a 'roof'. The item that gave me this shape, though I have expanded mine, was this - Die Stefansbursa, or St Stephen's Purse reliquary. The credit for this image is the Kaiserliche Schatzkammer, the Imperial Treasury in Vienna (the image can be found under the header "The Holy Roman Empire").
As you can see, this is a very early piece of goldwork (for the Christian tradition), and dates to the early 9th century. It looks quite disorganised and primitive, maybe even a little vulgar (I love it, personally, but I will admit that it does look like the jewels have been applied quite haphazardly).
I wanted to take this basic shape, and the main colour, and create an interesting little box of my own.

So let's have a look at where I am today. Firstly, here's a sneak preview of my smocking. I've included some little pearl beads that I managed to buy a pack of, and though they're not quite as regular as they might have been, the effect of them, caught in the smocking, is a good start towards a metallic-themed object.

Today I'm trying out some shadow-quilting by making a base in felt, pinning it down to the lid of the box, and trimming it accordingly. Next I'll be sewing some more lamé over the top. The idea here is to make a more architectural object by introducing a more obvious 'roof'. As you can see, the box itself is made of buckram, which I cut in one piece, folded back, and machine stitched. I then assembled the box with hand-stitching. I felt a little bad about machining the edges, but thought it would for the best, as the lamé needs to be protected from rough edges.

Progress in my Project on Fabric Manipulation. Learning Smock Pleating.

It's now time for my project on fabric manipulation. I'm taking a bit of a departure from the folder, as I did with my appliqué sampler, and making a piece that I hope will show a bit of everything. I'll be talking about my inspirations for the project in a later post. Firstly, I'm taking the opportunity to learn about different kinds of pleating, and I'm diving in at the deep end to try smocking for the first time. For this project, I've got some real gold lamé - and I'm discovering that you have to get the stitch right first time! As it's gold leaf (well, faux-gold, at least!) over a plastic frame, once a hole is made with the needle, it stays there. There's no weave to manipulate back into shape around the initial puncture. So I've gotten my ruler out and made several rows of dots, each 1cm apart, the height defined by the part of the project I want to cover with it, the width about 2.5 times wider than that to allow for the gathering. I'm doing a kind of running stitch along the rows, picking up a few millimetres of fabric at each dot, then jumping to the next one with a long loop of thread. To get this right, I referred to another of the books I have in my second-hand collection: Smocking Design by Jean Hodges, published in 1987. A very helpful book technically, and one that taught me the correct way to lay out the smocking 'plan'. More on this when I've gathered it up.

Trip to the V&A Archives - Part Six - Orphrey Panel

Credit here at the V&A.

Here is an example of later English work - post-plague, that is. This piece is dated 1380-1410, and as the museum records specify, " It is not... the finest in quality." It is a panel from an orphrey, and depicts the martyrdom of St Thomas Becket. Again, as the museum records state, "the quality of English embroidery and design was starting to decline [at this date]". It is still using the same types of stitch in the main, but the execution is now flawed - as the plague years had certainly disrupted the craft and trade life of the country (and especially the inner-London guilds and workshops where the work mostly took place), it is perhaps to be assumed that the artisans who would earlier have passed on their skills to the apprentices had mostly been 'taken' with the sickness, and that the later work was a result of retrospective study of finished pieces. A few details of the piece:

Firstly, the faces of the knights, with underside-couched mail and laid silver thread for helmets, the silver having mostly oxidised and turned a dirty, dark grey. Especial care has been taken to differentiate between the knights with different styles of beard and moustache.

A detail of the altar here, which shows many different textured stitches, one of which interests me particularly - the diamonds at the lower edge of this photo. Take note also of the figure partially hidden by the icon. This face is a good example of the decline in stitching standards - compare it with the faces in my last post. The museum record remarks that the figure of Mary is "crudely drawn".

Lastly, a detail of Becket's cloak, which does hark back to earlier examples in that the direction of the stitching follows the stress of the fabric in the painted figure - but it looks as though there are only two colours used, which makes the contrast too defined. In earlier examples, the colour was slowly changed, or the stitching did the work in a single tone. This gives this example a stiff, crumpled look.

I had a brilliant day at the archives, and hope to return many times. All the images in this series are printed in low resolution, and are not to be copied! They are the property of the V&A.

Trip to the V&A Archives - Part Five - Medieval Burse

Credit here at the V&A.

A Mediaeval Burse, made in England between 1310-40. As I've said previously, I watched a documentary on the BBC earlier this year, and it talked about Opus Anglicanum. This was a particularly English way of embroidering vestments and holy objects in the early Mediaeval period, between the mid-13th century (though it's difficult to give an exact dating, obviously, most of the larger examples of the craft can be reliably dated to 1270-1330.) and the beginning of the plague years, around 1330-40. Since I saw the programme, I've been interested to find out how many extant examples there are of this extremely precious craft. As I said in my essay on the lace rochet a couple of posts back, I found a whole thesis on it, the PDF of which is freely available from St Andrew's university. It was submitted in 1995 by a student called Christine Linnell. I've used her dating for the main English copes as a guideline, as the pieces she looks at are stated to date from between 1270 and 1330 (page 11 in the PDF). I may refer to it again as I go along. The piece I'm looking at today is one featured on the documentary, and again, it's something I saw at the V&A archives. Towards the end of my study session, I was allowed to look inside some of the cabinets containing light-sensitive materials, and saw this fantastic embroidery. As was said on the documentary, the staple features of Opus Anglicanum are two-fold. The stunning gold backgrounds, made with underside couching, and the swirling silk split-stitches that make up clothing and skin tones. Here's a good example of that stitching - a close-up on the crucifixion scene where the muscle tone is defined in stitch.

This effect was also utilised in multi-coloured strips to create strands of hair:

As well as the folds in headdress and cloak:

In this detail from the right-hand panel, you can see the way the knee holds the cloak out in folds - it's just sublime work:

Here, the effect of a darker fabric has been created by using a wider range of tones to show the bulges in the material. It's also possible to see the 'fur' lining of the garment at the lower left.

As this is quite a popular piece, I don't want to post too many pictures of it here, but I will say one thing - if ever I get the time to try out this technique of split-stitching, and can find a subject with plenty of depth to depict, I mustn't rush the execution of it - these stitches are maybe 1-2mm each. What really sets this work apart is the way the artists responsible have used texture to show depth, whilst keeping the surface of the work completely flat. Perhaps, as they only had access to quite rudimentary dyes, this was born of necessity. Thinking about this concept of '2D textures' might be quite a good starting point for a simpler project.

Trip to the V&A Archives - Part Four - Venetian Collar

Credit here at the V&A.

The last item I requested was another piece of Venetian lace. Although a very pretty, winding design, the workmanship in this collar is a little uncertain. It is a transitory piece between the last post, the ruff edging, and the first post, the Venetian rochet. The Style of motif is becoming very baroque, moving away from the renaissance obsession with the classics, and in particular it's insistence on geometry being the basis of all design. This is a far more 'natural' piece, and though most of the motifs are still plain-filled with rows of reinforced buttonhole stitch, some patterned fillings are appearing. The major difference in lace construction technique between this piece, dated 1660-75, and the last piece, the ruff dated 1600-20, is the outlining of the design with raised edges. This is something that is talked about a great deal in Alençon lace, where the outlines are also slightly raised. Apparently, both kinds of lace were carefully edged by buttonholing around a horsehair, though in Venice, this strengthening frame was taken quite literally to new heights, as picot-covered rings and large padded crescents emerged as staples of Italian Gros Point. In the French lace industry, this happened less often, though the workers did consider themselves excellent imitators of Italian lace when the commission required it. So once again, let's have a look at the close-ups I took.

An edging.

Some of the more raised sections.

A sense of scale.
As you can see from this piece, the design, fillings, edging technique, and scale were all advancing at terrific pace. This collar may not be the most refined piece of it's kind, but as an example of the mid-century transitional style, it's very significant indeed.

Trip to the V&A Archives - Part Three - Italian Ruff Edging

Credit here at the V&A.

One of the smaller objects I had requested was this retticella (sometimes called retticello, though whether this is an antiquated spelling, or a plural form, I'm unsure) ruff edging from 1600-20. Again, it's Italian, and according to museum records, 203 x 11.5cm laid flat. The collar is a recent reconstruction, made to display the lace edging. It's made with linen thread, and is a perfect example of the kinds of edgings that were reprinted over and over in pattern books for laceworkers at the end of the 16th century. I'll just take the opportunity to talk for a moment about a book that's been really very helpful in allowing me to judge the age of lace. It's a facsimile of "singuliers et nouveaux pourtraicts", published in 1587. This book, with it's more recent title of "Renaissance Patterns for Lace, Embroidery and Needlepoint", was originally published in France by the Italian author/designer Frederico Vinciolo. According to the editor's note, it was republished in 17 editions by 1658, when it's geometric style of lace was going out of fashion. My edition is a smaller reprint/English translation from 1971, based on a 1909 Italian edition. So it's fair to say it's been a widely printed book in it's time. With the basic framework of 'wheels', radiating 8 points outwards to the slightly rounded edges of the piece, themselves covered in stacks of semicircles, those in turn decorated by small picot, this is a classic piece of early 17th century Italian lacework. It's beautifully preserved, almost as white as the fine linen to which it has been attached in recent years. And it bears more than a passing resemblance to some of the patterns featured by Vinciolo. The trick to successful lacemaking in the early 17th century, it seems, is to make your patterns very 'black and white'. That is, a pattern is set down, and filled in very densely, the picots making the only concession to fancy stitches. There are no fillings, stars, or meshes. Only geometric lace in white that shows up magnificently against a black jerkin or doublet. Just to show how dense that stitching is, let's take a look at some of my close-ups.

The visible pattern repeats of the edging.

A sense of scale. Again, the black tip of the pencil is 18mm.

The fluting means some of the motifs are partially hidden.

Viewing this last picture full-size, it's possible to see that in each of the leaf-shaped constructions, there are about 5/6 rows of stitching. In the triangles near the edging points, there are about 9/10 rows. Judging by the scale of the pencil, that's 15-20 rows in a centimetre. Considering that this piece represents some of the earliest styles of lace, and that it is in such a fantastic state of preservation, the construction, compared to later lace, seems a little limited. It is a little basic in the range of stitches used, and the finished item often distorts as it is not sufficiently supported, as later laces were, for example by a mesh 'background'. However, it is a stepping stone that must be recognised in the evolution of lace, and I felt privileged to view it. 

Trip to the V&A Archives - Part Two - Victorian Lace

Credit here at the V&A.

The second item I chose to look at was inspired by a detail seen in the marvellous book, Victorian Lace, by Patricia Wardle. I may well refer to it in this post, so just to make sure I get the page numbers right, my copy is from the first edition in 1968. Seen above, in the first picture of this post, is the V&A reference picture for the item I viewed, though as you can see, there are a few pieces which have been photographed together. The piece I'm talking about today is second from the top. The second picture on their collection page is an excellent detail, showing to better advantage the magnificent design used to create the illusion of a sheen on a three-dimensional object. In my book, a mid-shot is used (plate 14, page 76). The study table was very large, and the lace laid out this way, so without rotating all of my photos, and possibly losing my bearings in the process, the details I took are seen this way up:

As I say, this book has been very useful in showing me the various sorts of Victorian lace available, the stand-out exhibition pieces, and the scale of the industry. At the risk of sliding back into the purely speculatory maths of my last post, there is an interesting figure at the start of the book. On page 18, she quotes from a source near-contemporary with this lace - and I'm going to quote her, quoting them: "P. L. Simonds wrote in the Art Journal of 1872 (p. 295): 'Besides the enormous consumption of our cheaper Nottingham lace and the pillow-lace of Honiton, we import foreign lace to the value of £750,000 sterling.' ". One assumes this is an annual figure. He goes on to list the different components that make up this figure, stating that they are 'declared imports', and seeing as he is nearer them than I am, I will give him the benefit of the doubt, and assume that he is unlikely to wish to embellish those figures, and even though his tone seems to imply he is unhappy at the volume of these imports, to believe that he has used a reliable source(s) for his information. So again, I will use the calculators at the fantastic Measuring Worth and adjust £750k for 1872 prices. This time, as it's a nationwide import, I'll use the calculator for a share of GDP. This comes out at £973,700,000. Adjusting that to US dollars (just over 1.52bn), and checking up on a list of UK Imports for 2012, available in list form from the Observatory of Economic Complexity, we can see that that is pleasingly approximate to what the UK spent on "Artificial Textile Machinery" in that year. So it's less than 0.01% of imports, supposedly. But £750,000 was surely more than a fortune in Victorian times - I would have thought it played more of a role in the economic life of the 19th century. But that's a question for another time.

According to my book, and backed up by the museum entry, the piece I'm talking about today is of Alençon lace, made for the Paris International Exhibition (or exposition, though both are used) of 1867, and was designed by a man by the name of Alcide Roussel. I can't find out much about him, which is disappointing. The only other piece I can see that is attributed to him is also mentioned in my book, though where the item itself is now, I don't know.
It's this parasol cover, apparently designed for the same event -

Edit note: I have since found this piece actually pictured in the original journal from 1867. It can be found in digitised form here. Edit note 2: I have now found in this same exhibition catalogue the actual piece of work that is the subject of this post. It is viewable on page 103.

On a side-note, two other illustrations in the catalogue were also familiar to me. One piece, seen here on page 167 of the catalogue, is actually viewable in the Met - I'd seen it in the Met collection quite a while ago, just browsing, and had been greatly impressed with the naturalism of the piece, which helped me to remember where it was - I thought it looked familiar! The actual record photo for the piece puts it on a red background, which makes it look quite crude and results in a very harsh photograph, so here is the link to the piece on the museum's timeline of art history. It is also featured in a small plate in my book, no. 39 on page 142.

The second piece I recognised as a different plate in my book (again, I'm still talking about Victorian Lace, the book I mentioned at the top of the post), number 28, on page 119. It's a much better image than in my print book, though! The two shawls featured can be seen here. They were included in the book, not just for their significance and expense, but because they were such excellent examples of the design trends seen at the height of the lace revival. The design in the piece I got see could also be favourably judged by these standards, so let's look at that design.

Quite apart from Roussel's insistence on using the best lacemakers in the business (as this piece is true Alençon lace, albeit, according to my book, made by a company based in Paris and Bayeux; Auguste Lefébure & Fils (more about them later). and making the lace as light and, again, as fine as possible (see some of my photos lower in this post with the scale shown), his designs were going to be a hit with the mid-Victorians who flocked to see them because they were so quintessentially of that time. As my Victorian Lace book says (on pages 30/31), the major decorative elements used in lace were taken from architecture (in the book, the two shawls that I linked to in the last paragraph were given as the best examples of architectural motifs), featured past lace motifs categorised by era 'Gothic', 'Rococo', for example, stylised monograms, crests, and various intertwining borders, such as ribbons, bows, and other such imitations of textiles. But by far, the biggest decorative theme was the natural world, especially bouquets or 'sprays' of different flowers.

In the catalogue entry from the 1867 journal, the engraving is surrounded by the words, "we engrave also on this page a FLOUNCE of Alençon point, after the design of Mr. ALCIDE ROUSSEL, of perfect workmanship. The system of shading is happily introduced, so as to give to the border that surrounds the foliage the very remarkable effect of being fluted." [sic]. I hope that Roussel familiarised himself with what was possible by watching (or perhaps even participating in) the manufacture. Looking at that fluted effect myself, I was astounded by the effect, and how delicately it was introduced over several layers of denser and denser stitches. Now, without further ado, a small gallery of the piece in close-ups.

A dragonfly (the sections of whose wings are each filled with a different stitch, some like picot'd portholes, and some beautifully fine twisting fronds, woven into the mesh background.

The speckled fillings of the leaves.

Scale of the border. The black pencil tip, without lead extended, is about 18mm.

More scale, and the corner of a section.

The remarkable fluting effect.

Some 'windows' in the scroll-work.

Finally, a close-up showing how the smallest parts of the design are attached to the mesh.

I've been unable to find out more about Alcide Roussel apart from his name mentioned once in an old French art journal, towards the top of page 196. I have been unable to ascertain, due to the very sparse mentionings of lace (or dentelle) in the following pages, why his name appears.

The Lefébure family are less obscure. In fact, the Auguste who ran the manufactory at the time Roussel was designing for them was something of an author, with a fairly long (300+ pages) book to his name; Dentelles et Guipures [Lace and Guipure]. His son Ernest, who ran the business after him, also wrote a book, a history of French lace, at a more modest length of around 70 pages; Les Points de France [Needlepoint Lace of France]. Both of these books are readable online, thanks to the University of Arizona. They are available, about 2/3rds of the way down the page, here.

Trip to the V&A Archives - Part One - Venetian Alb

Credit here on the V&A.

This week, I went on a trip to the V&A archives. It being a public museum, part of it's archive team deals with requests to see items from members of the public. Having selected some items I wished to view, I was assigned an assistant curator who handled the objects for me, and allowed me to see some of the other stand-out pieces from the Textile Collection. The first object I had selected was this Rochet, made in Venice in the late 17th century - when I selected it, it was categorised as an alb, but has recently changed description on the archives, and become a 'rochet'. A quick look into definitions of rochet have revealed that it is a garment of similar use to an alb, but used more widely in the Roman Catholic church than the alb. I chose this item for it's incredible - incredible - lacework. This is not only Venetian lace (which, we read, is highly thought of even by Alençon masters), but dates from the golden age of Venetian lace. It is not only the type most often associated with great princes of the time (such as Louis XIV, who was apparently a great enthusiast, rarely to be depicted without some at his neckline), but the type where the quality is most obviously seen in the work's scale. The work is minuscule. In some of the pictures I was kindly allowed to take, I've inserted my note-taking pencil into the frame to give an idea of scale. The black top of the pencil is around 18mm long.

In the first picture seen above, I've shown two details at once. Firstly, the edge of the lace collar, with it's many stages of scalloped edging, and well-preserved pin-picots. Secondly, the gathering of the body of the rochet into the shoulder, and the density of pleats that made up the main fabric of the garment. 

Here is the promised pencil, showing the scale of the stitching.

The end of a beaded tassel falling on a tie from the collar.

Another shot of the collar, showing how that beautiful peachy standing band contrasts with the complex shapes of the lace.

Another edging, found on the hem, and possibly even more complex than at the neck.

A shot of a motif that shows well the diversity of the patterns used as fillings.

More typically Venetian natural motifs.

A beautifully filled motif, along with some raised rings with several kinds of picot.

The collar - such a variety of colours within the silk.

And finally, the back of a motif, carefully shown to me by the curator. A few construction stitches can be seen, but mostly as tidy as the front, albeit without the raised sections.

I could carry on talking about the fineness of the piece, it's merits, it's span of styles and techniques, for hours. But what should be apparent, what should be far more widely known, is the rarity of such an item. Venetian lace from this date is rare, yes. And so finely worked is rarer. But this piece is on a scale that most have employed a workshop for months, if not, literally, years. Without doing my own experiments, and without anyone to ask for a time estimate, I cannot say more definitely than that. But just to stress how rare this is, and what kind of commission this must have been, let's consider similar items.

It is very difficult to judge the worth of a piece like this at the time, but it is always interesting to try, and even without coming up with a totally verifiable figure, to get a sense of the worth which was placed on textile work once upon a time is an appealing prospect. I have attempted to find prices paid for Venetian lace closer to the date of this object, but find myself without any reliable recent sources. I have, therefore, fallen back to the (admittedly less reliable, but often-quoted) Victorian sources on the subject of lace. Firstly, I looked back at Mrs Bury Palliser's A History of Lace, and in particular her chapter on Louis XIV. She talks about 'canons' (ruffles of lace at the ends of breeches, serving as boot-tops), and in particular, she asserts that the King had bought a pair worth 7000 livre. Unable to find a calculator to adjust French currency for inflation, I gave up this particular source, and turned to a physical book in my collection, Histoire du point D'Alençon by Madame G Despierres, 1886. I should stress my copy is a recent facsimile/translation! In it, she helpfully mentions a good way of converting seventeenth century French currency to English, by the estimate of two shillings to a livre (introduction, page ix).
If we take this as true (which is dubious, as it is followed by a second footnote, for another paragraph, which seems to imply that "since there were no buttons let alone button-holes in 1665 [there is no translation possible]".), it is possible to adjust worth, using the fantastic site Measuring Worth. If we take it that 7000 livre X 2 gives us the number of shillings, 14,000, then divide that by 20 to give us the number of pounds, we can enter £700 into the calculator, giving a rough year guide of 1660, as this is the date mentioned by Mrs Palliser. It makes for startling reading, and one can only hope that the information she was working from gave the wrong number of 0's. Measuring Worth gives a number of different results, based on whether you want the value of a commodity, labour, or a government investment/building project. As, one would assume, this item must have been specifically commissioned for the King, it initially makes sense to take the 'labour value' as the value of the item, especially as the labour is what gives lace it's true value. The estimates available rely on different indexes of worth. The commodity calculator uses the RPI, and therefore adjusts the cost of items and services according to the rate of inflation as applied to staple goods, such as food, clothing, and shelter. The labour value calculator is adjusted according to the average wage of the day, and how much it would cost the average person to do work to the given value you input.

Therefore the labour value defined as "the wage a worker would use to pay for a commodity" could be reversed and defined as "the wage given a worker in exchange for a commodity", surely. In 2013 values (the most recent the calculator can produce), this is  £1,387,000.00. Surely, even for Louis XIV, this is ludicrous verging on dangerous! Not quite believing this, I took a look at another of Mrs Palliser's figures, a quote from a 1670 journal a little further down the page. "At the court of France... People think nothing of buying rabats, manchettes, or canons to the value of 13,000 crowns", writes her quoted party, a M. Saviniere d'Alquie (not someone I can find any trace of outside of her book, though this may be due to antiquated spelling of his name). If we take "crowns" to mean écu, sometimes called 'French Crowns', and convert them into livre by multiplying by 6, we get 78,000L. If we divide this by 10 to convert it into pounds, we get £7800. Adjusting the year to 1670, the year Mrs Palliser gives for her source on d'Alquie, entering it into the calculator gives a frankly utterly unbelievable labour value of over £15m, with a commodity value of £1.1m. This doesn't sound like a reliable source to me, but let's look at the scope of what you could buy nowadays to adorn yourself. Clothing is less important to us now, and so perhaps it is unfair to compare clothing costs nowadays to pieces of someone's wardrobe in the 17th century, especially when it comes to someone like Louis XIV (or his diamond-collecting courtiers, such as Cardinal Mazarin, who would have been a perfect candidate for a robe like this, had he lived slightly later into the century!). It might perhaps be fairer to compare this kind of luxury accessory to jewellery, or a gold watch. So let's have a look at some recent records. According to (who else?) Guinness World Records, the most expensive dress ever sold made it's price from cultural significance - being worn by Marilyn Monroe. It sold for £2.8m - but the record for jewellery - or at least, for a stone already cut, and ready to be set to wear, is £52m for a single pink diamond. And who could value the crown jewels? After all, Louis was a king. Oh - one more price: only last month the most expensive watch was sold, raising bids of £13.4m! So perhaps some new lace for a big occasion was quite possibly worth those adjusted prices.

If we take that price as possible, then, how much lace did Louis get for his money? Well, using Janet Arnold's Patterns of Fashion 4, we can see the typical length of boothose about 20-30 years before Louis' canons - this is a fair comparison, as canons certainly evolved out of this slightly earlier fashion. The boot-tops seen on page 107 are as close as we can get to official measurements of a contemporary piece, as any ruffled piece from slightly later in the century (and I'm not aware of one currently) would naturally only be measured in an estimated way. These boothose tops are about 12 inches around the leg and fall 12 inches down. If we take 12 inches to be the standard length, and add a little width-wise to allow for the gathering - say, make the measurement 20" (Venetian lace is thick, and very stiff, and wouldn't gather like fabric, I'm sure), we're left with 480 square inches of lace for the pair. If he paid £700 for the pair, that's about £1.46p an inch. In old coinage, that's £1, 9s, 2d per square inch, or 14-15 livre. If we take the UNESCO website for the cultural Heritage of Alencon's estimate of 45 hours per square inch (they say seven hours for a square centimetre, and as there are 6.45 square cm. in a square inch, I've multiplied accordingly - 45.15 hours) for Alençon lace as a guide, that's about 8 old pence (or 3.2 new pence) per hour of work. That's about 1/30th of a pound, or 1/3rd of a livre. There are 20 sols in a livre, so we'll say roughly 7 sols an hour.

It was at this point in my research that I thought I had reached an impasse. Checking back with Madame Despierres, I noticed the sentence "The wages were good, 4 to 13 sols per day from 1660 to 1780" (page 55). She also talks about the working day of an apprentice lacemaker - 6am to 8pm, or 14 hours (page 44). An apprentice would probably not be paid for her work at all, one could assume, and would be rewarded in lodging and food - when joining the profession proper, she'd likely work the same hours, but be at the lower end of the pay scale - and that's certainly less than a sol an hour. But we're getting away from the article really at hand here - let's work backwards from the figure given as a daily wage, and see how much an item like the rochet would have cost to make, disregarding how much people were said to have paid - then we'll have more of an idea which calculator is to be trusted.

So how much lace is in the rochet? Well, if we can estimate the width and length of the rochet's lace sections, perhaps we can begin to work out it's worth. The rochet flares towards the ground, and as I couldn't measure the object reliably as it had to be kept held in shape by acid-free paper, I will have to take an educated guess. If we take the flaring as a conservative six feet at the hem, assume it is made as a band (it gathers into the pleated body of the garment, so is a reasonable assumption) and work from the photo and given measurements given in the online description, we can estimate the width (or in this case, the height) of the band to be around three feet. Say the very loose sleeves are around 20" at the cuff, and a foot deep, for the sake of the experiment. The collar was about 5 inches deep, and obviously, quite wide, as it was pleated into the neck. If we refer again to Janet Arnold, and take the outside measurement of a 17th century shirt's collar (which falls in a similar way from the neck opening) as a general guide, a quick survey of the falling collars closest to this one makes it a convenient 20" around. If we say that the lace 'skirt' of the robe is 18 square feet, the cuffs and collar make a rough 4 square feet, after a bit of working out. So that's 22 square feet of lace.

It may be more sensible to work out the production costs of the robe than to compare them by the square inch to the bold claims of Louis XIV's courtiers now that we have a rough salary for them - just to reiterate, that was between 4 and 13 sol a day in French manufacturies. Let's say 10 sol a day, as Mme Despierres' salary estimate covers such a wide time-frame. If we assume the V&A's dating for the piece, 1685-1700, is correct, and in 1660 the workers were paid 4 sol in France, it makes sense for their wages to rise a little with inflation; obviously, her book concentrates mostly on the French lace of the period, and as Venetian lace was the very best, it's likely that in the early years of the French establishments, the Venetians were probably better paid than they were, being the original artisans. Again, this is only an experiment, and the perceived worth of the workers and their products was, I'm sure, less than they deserved.

So, the first thing to do is work out how many hours labour are in the piece. Well, if it measures about 22 square feet, and we multiply that by 144 to get the inches, that's 3168. Just to check my findings, I drew out a diagram to be sure, and then multiplied the length and width of each box  representing a component (in inches) and added them together - my estimate of 22 sq. ft. was close, as it came out to 3172. Again, if we refer to UNESCO, and say that there are 45 hours of work per square inch, that's an astonishing and frankly incredulous 142,740 work hours. Divide that by 14 to get the number of work days - that's 10,196 days (that is, for one worker, though it's still unbelievable - perhaps this was actually a project carried out by a generation of nuns?), not including design work, revision of designs for the client, setting up the workshop for such a large design (it may have been made in pieces and assembled, like Alencon lace later was, but as it is not a mesh based lace, I think it's more likely that the fronds of the natural design would have been made in one piece, or the finished design could warp when sewn together if a few millimetres out). How many days would one have worked per week in Venice? I would incline towards 6, as it's well known that even in the later Victorian era, it was unusual for a 'seamstress' to take a half-day Saturday, and so I would expect Sundays to be given over to various church services, especially in as deeply religious a place as Venice. So, how many work days is that in a year? Well, 365 minus one seventh is roughly 313. So 10,196 days is heading towards THIRTY-THREE YEARS of work if it had been done by a single individual - though this is admittedly very unlikely, it's difficult to imagine how many people could have been involved accurately. A quick note: if we assume that the lace for the 'skirt' was put together in one piece, even if that piece was completed in sections and rolled across a frame, as I understand is sometimes done in conservation work, it's unlikely to have fitted into a worker's cottage, and as it was such specialist work, having it in the same room for one or two years as children, parties, especially cooking - it must have been done in a room set aside for the purpose. Perhaps the sleeves and collar were made by one individual, and the larger piece was worked on by one or more other lacemakers whose work was more uniform - though if there was a definite break in style, I couldn't see it in my brief study period.

But was this amount of work really feasible? Well, let's look at some other examples. In this PDF by needlework author Jane Zimmerman, she estimates the time required to complete one of the Order of the Golden Fleece copes I've talked about in previous posts. She estimates 20,000 to 30,000 work hours per cope. In the set, as I've previously mentioned, there are three copes, a dalmatic, a chasuble, and an altar frontal, all made with the same technique. Considering that this is her estimate of the stitching, who knows how long it took to make the design up, paint the master copy, paint that transfer onto the fabric, and to finish the edging and line the cope when complete. For the complete set, that could be upwards of 150,000 hours of stitching, plus those tasks.
In this PHD thesis on Opus Anglicanum, published by the university of St Andrew's, the author, Christine Linnell, talks in great depth about the work involved in producing embroidered copes, though she uses only one formal time-scale: "In the field of religious embroidery the most notable contemporary counterpart is the cope produced for the Queen's Silver Jubilee in 1977 by Beryl Dean  and students... The execution of this cope was carried out over two years. In spite of the modern interpretation used for the churches which make-up the design--they were made in pieces and later assembled on the backing fabric, allowing for the use of faster techniques such as applique--it took approximately 6,015 hours to embroider them. Miss Dean spent 7,500 hours in preparation and many hundreds more to do the applied work necessary for the assembly and the making-up." This refers to the cope seen here on Beryl Dean's website. This is a cope mostly made with appliqué, as you can see from Linnell's description - yet the work hours involved are considerable. Lace is notoriously painstaking, and for most Venetian lace objects in museum collections, their scale is modest. In fact, the only piece I've seen that is a comparable size (provided my estimate of this rochet is correct, not conservative) is this piece at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, a flounce which carries a staggering 3218.5 square inches of lace, though this does include a uniform border, which might not be considered true lace. The only piece that I have seen that is larger is also in the collection of the V&A, and is apparently an altar frontal composed entirely of needle-lace. It may be seen here, and is apparently 100x44 inches. That's 4400 square inches. In the second image of the catalogue record, the markedly raised surface shows a different variety of Venetian lace - possibly the slightly less prized 'Gros Point', as opposed to that seen in the rochet, which I believe is called 'Rose Point'. Let's now return to the rochet.

Before that tangent, I was going to work out the labour cost of those hours. I'll do it in stages to reduce the possibility of making a mistake. 10,196 days x 10 sol = 101,960 sol. There were 20 sol in a livre, so let's divide: that's 5098. A livre was worth two shillings, so let's multiply again. We're back to 10196, pleasingly. There were 20 shillings in a pound, so in pounds, that's £509.80. Again, in Mme Despierres, she adds the value of the thread for Alençon lace as being one seventh the cost of the project, as another trade, that of the thread-spinner, had to be at its peak to produce the fine thread necessary to the work (page 51). As the cost of labour was the major investment in the production of lace, I don't think it would be out of order to add one seventh to provide for the thread, which adds £72.83. On page 30, she also mentions the price of the vellum that provided the base for the designs. "In 1749 calf skins cost twenty seven sols and sheepskins ten sols." It's more likely that the higher quality material was used, but how much of it would have been? Perhaps two or three square feet per hide? Once treated (and dyed green, see above), it would have to be a regular thickness across the surface, so as to keep the threads uniformly taut. So if we say that the collar, and each cuff, required about two square feet each, that's still 6-9 hides for the main body. Let's say 11, and reduce the estimated cost for a slightly earlier time to about 20 sol or one livre, just to make the maths a little easier. That's 22 shillings or £1.10. So let's add those three components together - that's £583.73. I'm unable to reliably estimate the design and delivery costs on the evidence I have, and although I have heard of the bill for lace also including the lighting and heating of the studio (additional bills for candles and coal), and for the pricking paper to transfer the design, but these items will have had quite widely differing prices, and I'm sure will have been only a slight addition. One extra that I am unable to calculate does bother me, though. Whether the studio would have levied a profit margin, and whether that was a standard charge, or a percentage of works completed. This is, at the moment, impossible to know.

Let's enter that figure of £583.73 in the calculator for the year 1690. The commodity value comes out as £88,850.00 and the labour value as  £1,135,000.00. Here's where it gets interesting. If you take the commodity value and the labour value (which, as we saw, ran into millions for both the items tested) of the lace mentioned earlier by Mrs Bury Palliser, the boot-tops for Louis cost either £91,700.00 or £1,387,000.00. Obviously, whoever the clergyman was that wore this rochet, he would have been an extremely wealthy man. Just not wealthy enough to afford what Louis XIV had (would it even have been allowed if he had the resources? It might well have been a faux pas to wear something more luxurious than the monarch). After all, his full-length robe, if these figures are to be believed, would have cost about the same as the King's boot-tops. If the lace made for the king was really so fine as to cost 7000 livre - how I wish an example of it still existed. It must have been like cobwebs.

An Extra Project - More Crochet.

Just a quick post on a project I didn't write up earlier in the year. I crocheted a pair of gloves from a 1920s pattern, making my own adjustments for finger length and thumb gusset as I went along. Again, they're made with crochet cotton, and therefore don't stretch well. Thus, the thumb gusset is a little taut when the fingers are outstretched. I made a pair, although as I was photographing them alone, I could only hold out one hand at a time!