The lacemakers of Le Puy

At a glance

• Place: Le Puy-en-Velay
• Tools: pillow (carreau), boxwood bobbins, pins, pattern card
• Specialty: point d'esprit
• Time: 60 hours for a 20 cm doily; nearly 1,000 hours for a metre of cutwork runner

A legend and a landscape

Legend says bobbin lace was invented in 1407 by Isabelle Mamour, a young embroiderer making a robe for the Black Virgin. Shops in the town still display lace doilies and curtains. Madame Mazoyer learned lace from her mother at five and worked her pillow every day for more than eighty years.

How it is made

The lacemaker works on a carreau, once a wooden frame covered with oilcloth and decorated with holy pictures. She crosses linen threads around colored pins that follow a pattern drawn on a card. Bobbins are always handled in pairs, two in each hand; the basic cross uses four, and complex patterns can need 150 or more. The pins form the framework around which the grounds join motif to motif.

Revival

In the early 1970s Le Puy lace was close to vanishing, overtaken by machine lace and imports. Mick Fouriscot had pillows made, found old patterns and persuaded elderly lacemakers to teach. The teaching center she founded in 1974 trained more than 4,000 students, and the national lace workshop-conservatory opened in 1976.

Value of handwork

A simple Cluny doily twenty centimetres across takes sixty hours and sold for over 2,000 francs. Hand lace survived mainly through haute couture, surgery and restoration of old lace. Men once carved the plioirs on which finished lace was rolled.