Home-fashioned notebook of crocheted lace & tatting specimens, France ca. 1900-1920
A homemade album of crochet lace patterns and 46 original examples, 8.5 x 6 inches. Heavy card with orange paper lined covers and spine covering clipped from a magazine. The album contains multiple paper varieties, including pink and blue pages, roughly cut and possibly reused from packaging; several are sewn together around the edges to create a stronger panel for mounting the lace specimens. 18 total pages, the last few blank. 40 specimens are sewn to the pages with an additional 6 loosely inserted. 7 illustrations of lace designs clipped from a French magazine are glued to a single spread. They appear to be from La Mode Illustrée or a similar journal, ca. 1900-1920. The slim bit of illustration used to cover the spine also suggests the Art Nouveau era. Unlike the couture notebooks commonly produced in France in the 1940s and '50s as part of girls' education, this appears to be a personal collection and is wonderfully make-do. The exterior would have once been covered with the purple-striped paper still visible on the inside. The edges have worn so much over the years that the covering is long gone, revealing the use of scrap materials to create the album.