Seven angels, four kids, one family

Well, I’ve just gotten off the phone with my mother, and I’ve got some information that changes the first Lace post.

Tragically, there is no more of “the real stuff.” It’s just…gone. My mother doesn’t have any. She says my uncle won’t have any either, but I’m still kind of hoping.

Ivy, you were right that “the real stuff” would be done in circles or cornered like a granny square, and they were mostly doilies and scarves. They were done without a pattern, as I said. All her afghans and crocheted garments also were done without patterns and often reverse-engineered from pieces she had seen others make. But that handkerchief was not one of them.

Everyone who identified the photographed lace as machined was correct. My mother said this wasn’t even the “nice” kind of handkerchief.

These were the ones made at The Shop, which I now know is the Liberty Handkerchief Co., on Union Street in Brooklyn. (It’s no longer there.) They did their work as contractors for White House and Stein Dobbin Lace Companies, and apparently the labels don’t even say Liberty. (You can google up a Liberty Handkerchief that exists in England; it’s not the same.)

My mom says that what you had to do to make these were to run up the seam right to the corner, then turn the handkerchief around and run back down the same seam. The trick was to do this without creating a tag in the back (ie, no extra fabric) and without leaving any holes. Then after that, you had to turn over the handkerchief and cut off the “wing” that would be left there. They called this a mitered corner. (?)

Then the handkerchiefs would be bundled up in packs of twelve, tied with a ribbon, and sold for eighty cents.

My grandmother’s shop also made scarves, baby dresses, mantillas, chaplets, satin sachets, and “doggies” during the slow season. (I wasn’t aware there was a slow season for handkerchiefs, by the way.) The “doggies” would be dogs and other animals made of terry cloth, then brought to another location where they’d be filled with foam rubber, and they’d be sold as kids’ sponges. My grandmother was good at finding work for the shop and that was one of the fun ones, my mom tells me.

Next time I’m at her house, I’ll photograph “the good handkerchiefs” and post those.

I’m utterly bummed that the Real Handmade Lace isn’t around any longer. That stinks. I mean, it’s nice to have these, but I wanted one of the ones she’d made for herself, right out of her own head. But my mom said those were from when grandma was younger, before she’d be staying up until three in the morning a few days a week trying to keep the shop afloat, and back when her hands didn’t hurt to be working with fine thread like that.

My mom said she didn’t know it was important to me, but I guess you don’t realize what’s important to you when you’re a kid and all this stuff just surrounds you. It’s just part of the past that vanishes away and then you wonder later on where it all went.

[There's an update to this post because now we have more information. Link at the bottom.]

My grandmother came home from school at age ten to crochet hats for her family to sell. They needed the money.

It was New York in the late teens/early 1920s. A few years later, my grandmother quit school to work. She helped the family by crocheting and sewing. In later years, she married my grandfather and together they opened “the shop.”

I’m sure the shop had a name, but I never heard it called anything other than “the shop.” (Help me out here, Mom.) Their workers were “the girls.” The Shop dominated their lives (as all privately-owned businesses do) but it’s all nebulous to me. I know my grandmother had a patent on a kind of lacy pillow with a pocket on the front, and I know they made dresses and other garments. I know my grandmother was the one with all the business sense and my grandfather was so cheap he could make a penny cry. But the thing I know most is that grandma could make lace.

The lace handkerchiefs were the things I always heard about, and I actually have two preserved here in Angeltown. My mother and uncle have most of the rest of the extant handkerchiefs.

Check this out: 

And check out the detail:

I can’t imagine anyone blowing his nose into this. I mean, it would be sacrilege. And yet, she made them to be used. Hundreds of them. Thousands.

I recently saw my mother’s treasure chest, a hard-sided box the size of a pencil case with rusted hinges that makes a “kop” sound when it springs shut, and inside, dozens of Grandma’s crochet hooks, some so small you could perform cardiac surgery with them.

It wasn’t until this weekend that I learned the most amazing thing: my grandmother didn’t need a pattern to do these. In fact, she couldn’t read patterns at all.

If you don’t knit or crochet yourself, that doesn’t sound like much, but even with my rudimentary knowledge of what it takes to make lace, I’m flabbergasted. From my minimal understanding, lace requires using increases and decreases in order to create a pattern. More than that, it means managing the increases and the decreases so they come out even at the end of the line, so they “lean” correctly one way or the other, and yes, so they look pretty.

My grandmother? Did all that in her head.

Can you imagine just picking up some thread and a hook and making this?

My mother says the same is true of my stepfather’s grandmother, that she too never read a pattern, that she just pictured what she wanted a lace border to look like and then set to work, creating the openings and the closing spaces in order to make it happen, like ascii art (remember that?) as it emerged line by line.

Mom says, “It was a different time.” But surely not so different that people always thought in mathematical terms? That everyone could just see in their heads what happens when you increase here or decrease there, and when to lean an opening one way or the other, or decrease without leaving an opening at all? And that two “average” women, neither of whom exceeded a seventh grade education, could reverse-engineer any garment they came across in order to re-create it themselves, by hand, at home in the evenings with nothing other than some steel hooks and a few skeins of yarn?

My grandmother would be stunned by what I can do with MS Word, and today, I’m stunned by the magic she could work with a crochet hook.

We have an update to this post, by the way, based on Ivy’s comments and a phone call from my mom.