Still, I can’t help but pay homage to the plight of their makers. Confined only by their picot and buttonhole borders, these thoroughly English motifs were spun from simple, natural fibers into diaphanous marvels, and depict life as their patient makers never knew it. From ragged and starving workhouse children in cold corners, we received these collars and cuffs; their childlike emotions flowing through such small, skilled hands into swags and garlands encircling dainty posies, symbolic of their own confinement. From expert, wrinkled old grandmothers in drafty cottages, these flounces and edgings of incredible florals were produced by the mile for a pittance; as the padded stands in their shawl-covered laps pricked with pins and dangled with the maple and sheep-bone bobbins that, through the seeming randomness of twisting and knotting, reached to touch art. In Branscombe and many other villages across England, Scotland and Wales, many young girls took up this mantle of traditional lacemaking at the knees of their talented mothers, to supplement the meager income their fathers could supply.
