Don't Leavers (lace) alone - A work of art?

December 10, 2024

This month I am working with CSF online. I thought I would go down the traditional fabric route and look at Leavers lace, you may have heard of Leavers lace especially if you have looked online and seen the significant price difference that is between regular lace and Leavers lace, so what makes this lace a work of art?

Well, we need to go back two hundred and eleven years. John Lever (the ‘a’ was added after about 100 years) from Nottingham modified a lace making machine (originally the machine was made to make net) to make the Leavers lace. The last lace making firm in the UK that still makes the Leavers lace is Cluny Lace, a firm that is now run by the eight and ninth generation.

Unlike other laces in which the design is embroidered onto the fabric, leavers lace design consists of thousands of threads (which are loaded by hand) and woven together to make the design. The more intricate the design, the more thread is used, and the more expensive the lace will be. It is not a mass produced product, The machine is controlled by a chain of “punched cards” laced together into a continuous sequence. The holes on the punched cards determined the pattern created by the machine.

The designs of the lace can take weeks to produce and many designs are made from previous back catalogues of designs so here is an overview of the process Leavers

The idea of the lace begins with a drafter, their job is to draw up the design for the lace pattern.
This then gets passed to the technical drafter who transposes that drawing into a tracing.
A lacemaker is responsible for setting up the thread in the right order and position.
A winder's job is to place each thread on the bobbins and into the carriages to check that the weight and tension is correct.
The machine then begins to run and the workers must keep the machine fed with more thread as the lace is being made.
Experts called Tullists oversee the making of the lace.
The lace is inspected and any faults are fixed by hand to ensure that the repairs match the rest of the lace.

Easiest way to tell Leaver lace over standard lace. The background of standard lace will be the same size gaps throughout, whereas Leavers lace has different size gaps in the background.

What Lingerie designs I did

I mixed the Leavers lace with satin, I wanted to mix the two to create a timeless style. One style I kept all the same colour to let the fabrics shine out, and with the other set the colours I chose worked perfectly with black to create a vintage look which was a nod to the tradition of this lace.