About our products
Our haberdashery collection is antique and consists mainly of very high-quality laces in remarkable good, and sometimes aged, condition.
Most of our laces were found at an old house owned by a lace manufacturer family (Experton, Frere et Soeur, Retournac, c. 1900). It was exactly 1903 when the brother and sister, Claire and Auguste Experton, founded their first handmade bobbin lace factory in Retournac (France). Nowadays, the Retournac Lace Factory Museum is in the actual building where this factory was born.
Some of our laces are Belgian, the country of origin will always be shown in the product details.
All our laces and linens are antique and have never been used, they were made using the bobbin lace technique. Made out of natural durable fibers such as linen, cotton and hemp that soften and whiten with use and each wash.
The color shades go from white to ecru and cream, and because the handmade lace was made by different women and threads, on some occasions the color of each roll from the same type differs slightly. They have been stored for many decades (almost a century), so it is possible that some of them may show dust or a light patina; this is precisely what gives them their unique, endearing charm. I try my best to show and describe any exceptional wear or damage.
Please note that all our laces and linens are sold as found, unwashed and unused, so if any cleaning or ironing is needed, it will be left to the buyer. Gently hand wash or soak in soft soap, rinse, and let air dry. The ancient folk wisdom says that it is better to spread the fabrics on a meadow and let the dew and the moon naturally whiten the fabric.
We have both handmade and machine-made lace.
The practice of lace making didn’t really take off in Europe until the mid-sixteenth century. It is said that lace was ‘invented’ in Venice as a real labor of love. Across Europe, lace was used to decorate nearly everything, from collars to cuffs and gowns to furniture. By the eighteenth century, lace had become essential to fashion and was a commodity for the upper classes.
The making of lace was incredibly expensive, involving many people and hundreds of hours of work. The arrival of machine-made lace at first pushed handmade lace-makers into more complicated designs beyond the capabilities of early machines. But later on, they had to make more and more simpler designs because they also had to compete on price.
During the nineteenth century, the commercial manufacturing of lace was taken over by machines, and much of the process of lace making was mechanized. By the mid-century, machine-made lace had become so fine that even experts had difficulty telling the difference between machine-made and handmade lace.
