Scale

The development of machine lace extended the use of lace in areas previously not systematically explored because of their scale.

Examples include curtains and wall decorations, where the size of the strands remained the same but the area that the textile can cover was greatly expanded. However, they remain confined to private, interior and domestic uses because of their inherent fragility. Scaling up and expanding the range of materials used to design lacing patterns can open to applications in the public and urban spaces. When prototyping robotics processes we often begin with a scale that fits the constraints of the available tools. To study robotically fabricated lace, we have dramatically increased the scale of the individual strand, as well as the spaces between the strands. Once again, this can change the way we interact with and experience a lace object, moving from the realm of surface into the interstitial.

Machine-made lace was not only incomparatively cheaper than hand-made lace (allowing large segments of the population to acquire it), but also easier and faster to produce on a scale rarely seen before. New usages were adopted, like the one seen on this glass plate negative by the pictorialist photographer Clarence H. White. In this typical American bourgeois interior at the turn of the 20th century, lace curtains take center stage. The transparency of the fabric allows light to penetrate the dark interior while the lace grid evokes the geometric, bevelled glass of the window and the floral motifs play against the outside vegetation. From a commodity reserved for the financial elite, be it secular or religious, by the 20th century, lace had become synonymous with bourgeois and working classes interiors.

Clarence H. White

*Untitled (interior, Weiant house),* 1904

Glass plate negative, 21.5 x 16.3 cm.

From Princeton University Art Museum, Gift of Sally Weiant Boyd. x1992-170b.

Alt test tk — This exquisite example of Italian needle lace is one of the oldest in the collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. This geometric cutwork is characteristic of the free-flowing patterns made in late-16th century Italy called *punto-in-aria*. Here the link with the woven ground has been broken and lace turns from trimming or means of surface decoration into a fabric in its own right. This border made of fine linen with a rose pattern shows a grid of needle-woven and overcast bars, the solid areas worked in pairs of knotted buttonhole stitches and elaborated with buttonholed bars and picots. The extraordinary complexity of the technique can only be appreciated upclose and was produced in small scale.

Unknown

*Strip of lace,* 16th century

Needle lace, 27.9 x 6.4 cm

From Metropolitan Museum of Art. 79.1.139.