Pinned in Place
Red House Museum, Christchurch

December 9, 2006 to January 28, 2007 – Jane Atkinson distilled glories from her local environment into a vibrant new take on an old tradition.

I wonder if there’s a lacemaking gene? Nothing else really explains why I enjoy lacemaking so much, why I felt I ‘saw stars’ the first time I shifted bobbins, or why I have always wanted to design my own lace, even when I hadn’t a clue how to do it.  But I find I’m not the first in my family to get hooked.

My great grandparents (on my father’s side) were tailors, Harry Thompson being Regimental Tailor to the Lincolnshire Regiment, and a specialist in riding breeches, and his wife Florrie particularly good at making fall-front trousers. It was after they retired to Landford, between Salisbury and Romsey, that she joined the WI and went to Miss Glyn’s Downton Lace class, accompanied by her daughter Flo Teal.

Shelley Canning’s researches to mark the 40th Anniversary of the Downton Lace Industry’s dissolution turned up ‘bonus records’ for 1929 in Salisbury Museum which showed Mrs Thompson at 7th earning 10/10, and Mrs Teal at 14th earning 6/11, yet by 1931 Florrie Thompson had disappeared.

Why was that, I asked my aunty, Joy Cradock, who having been born in 1921 was of an age by then to be able to remember a bit about it. ‘We had to stop her!’, she explained.

‘She went at everything like a steam train, and became obsessed with lace, making it night and day to the exclusion of everything else.  In the end, she knew she had to stop doing it, to save herself.’

I have to admit that my own family have needed considerable patience over the years while I’ve worked up my own ‘passion’ for lace (a word I prefer!) into the contemporary pieces with which I lined the walls of the Foyer Gallery at Christchurch Red House Museum either side of Christmas 2006.

Designs have developed over the 25 years since tutor Gisela Thomas first allowed me to sit in on her City and Guilds Creative Embroidery Design class which had materialised in my local village hall. Knowledge of how to exploit my medium has been hard won, at first exploring what the geometry of the Torchon style and commercial grids had to offer, then pushing both grids and an ever-expanding palette of threads to express my appreciation of the beauties found in the landscape on my daily walks near my home in Christchurch, Dorset.

It was a competition title, The Sensitive Thread, which first had me examining the forces of nature that rule what goes on around here. If ‘sensitive’ means affected by what happens around you, thread might get caught up in the pushing and pulling of the tide, swirling water where our two rivers (the Stour and the Avon) join to empty into the sea at Mudeford, or dragged by gravity, like the fishing nets hung out to dry on the Quay.  All have since been subjects for lace pieces.