My husbands ancester born in the early 1800s in Devon was listed as a
lacemaker as a young woman before marriage, also her sister and her mother,
not far from Honiton so after her marriage she worked on the land and her
daughters were lacemakers.
My own Mother learned practical skills, cooking, knitting and dressmaking in
my lifetime to care for her own family in a time of rationing etc and low
wages and taught me both knitting and dressmaking, which I also put to good
use for my family and to help when wages were low. My 3 sisters all say I
have all the genes for that and rarely get knitting needles out and dont do
any other craft at all. I used to do some embroider in the 70s and a friend
and I taught ourselves crochet in the 70s and I went to classes in 2001 to
begin learning about lace, these I did for pleasure and also now with the
aid of the websites and you tube and the amount of books available to us due
to all the work and skills put in my so many of you and others have made
learning other crafts, like tatting a possibility after 40 years of wanting
to try.
My aunt who spent many months at a time in Stoke Manderville for surgery (we
as kids used to call her the bionic woman) also was taught crafts for
occupational therapy making pom pom owls and things like that, but I didn't
come across lace making until the 80s when I had no time or cash for such
luxuries and no idea how you did it. Around the area where I live now there
seems to be a lot of interest in the craft circles in spinning yarn and
weaving. Dressmaking seems to have popped up in my family, my great
grandmother and my great aunt made gowns for Selfridges (I think in the late
1890s and into the 1900's and in 1968 I asked my great aunt to make my
wedding dress which she did. At the age of 73 her hand stitches was tiny
and very neat still. I made my younger sisters wedding dress in the 70s.
Sue T UK
I think that after WWII people had few resources and had to be highly taxed
so
war debts could be repaid and their nations rebuilt. Â What is being written
makes a lot of sense to me. Â Women who could marry and raise a family after
1945 probably had too much to do as home makers.1940. Â Kay-Shuttleworth,
1949 MBE, lived from 1886-1967. Â She was the last
family member to live at Gawthorpe; she never married. Â War losses are very
apparent in the family tree published in a book about Shuttleworth's sister,
Angela James. Â The family tree is a form of validation of the problem of
more
women than men in some countries that were at war in the 20th C. Â Today,
Gawthorpe is a National Trust property, used for the study of material
arts -
lace, embroidery, ceramics, etc. Â
Jeri Ames in Maine USA
Lace and Embroidery Resource Center
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