Making lace in a throwaway world

I'm sharing a post I wrote in 2012 on my old blog. These times remind me that we sometimes need to seek comfort and find the quiet joys. It's like standing in the sun on a winters day...

Do you ever watch that movie Love Actually? I really like the voice over part at the beginning where the Hugh Grant character talks about how he feels much better about the state of the world when he thinks about the arrival hall at Heathrow, all that happiness and love right there. My feel-good place? Spotlight.

You cannot go into a Spotlight store and not feel that everything will be okay. (For those who don’t know, Spotlight is a large chain of stores that sell fabric, wool, sewing machines, buttons, curtains, everything you could ever need for making anything!)

These places are always busy, busy to the point of chaos. People, mostly women, are bustling about with arms laden with stuff! They are making curtains, deb dresses, baby clothes, knitting, making jewellery, you name it, it is going on. If there is a complex and time consuming craft that was only done by blind nuns in a remote convent on an island off the coast of a lost country, you can buy the materials to do it here.

I adore it. No matter what the state of the nation, what terrible atrocities are happening in the world, what the banks are doing, what the government is not doing, women are still making sure everyone has a warm jumper and matching cushions for their curtains. We are still sitting in front of the tv at night making things, because we can and that is what we do.

I don’t sew, I can but don’t tell anyone. At high school in our compulsory sewing class I accidentally sewed up the leg holes of the phys ed pants we had to make, ummm ... And don’t get me going on patchwork, why would you cut up perfectly good fabric just to sew it back together? But I can knit and crochet and embroider with the best of them. Not to mention all the other crafts that have been big parts of my life over the years.

Lace making was one of the ones that I had admired from a distance but thought life was too short to embark on that particular journey.Then in January, when in Sydney for an exciting visit to the Harry Potter exhibition (yes, geek out) we found ourselves in the Lace exhibition at the Powerhouse museum.

And really, wow. Apart from an exhibition of the most beautiful collection of contemporary lace art works, there is a lace making lab where some truly gorgeous ladies will show you how lace is made, tell you everything your heart could desire to know about lace; and, take you through the permanent lace collection.

Here is drawer after drawer of exquisite pieces, crafted over so many hours its hard to imagine. Lace dating back to the 15th century. A panel of lace depicting the story of Judith and Holofernes, marginally bigger than a credit card, needing a magnifying glass to really see the detail, made in a time when the artificial light was a candle!

But the big excitement for the lovely lady who had taken me in hand was their collection of modern lace. Particularly lace made in eastern Europe after the second world war. There was nothing, absolutely nothing to be had anywhere in Europe at this time, forget about fine threads and the leisure for making lace. But these artisans needed to create again, that was their healing journey back to a place of sanity. So this amazing lace is constructed out of fine wires, synthetic fibres, whatever they could use, they did. The modern designs and stark shapes tell their own story of lives moved into a different paradigm. It was some of the most beautiful art I have ever seen, and the most moving.

My life does not have room for lace making, as much as I admire it, I will stay at a safe distance. But it makes me happy to think that all over the world people are still taking up their bobbins and threads and keeping this tradition alive - don’t think for a minute that it is just old ladies either! 

This and so many other hand crafts might just be saving the world for us in ways we can’t see or ever imagine.

Originally published in 2012