Old Style Tatting--The French Connection?

excerpt from Manuel des Demoiselles (1830)

In Tatting (1850), Mlle. Riego wrote, "...it was also worked with a shuttle and pin, forming coarse trimmings, &c., consisting of small pieces worked separately, afterwards tacked on a paper pattern and sewn together with a very fine needle and thread,... In this state it has recently been revived in France under the title of 'Frivolitè.'"


In The Ladies Complete Guide to Crochet and Fancy Knitting (1854), Mrs. Stephens wrote: "The exercise of the art of Tatting as known to our grandmothers,...was never more elaborate that a neat, but rather substantial edging for a chld's dress or a lady's frill.... At the late French Exposition of Industry, however, some very beautiful and elaborate specimens having been exhibited, this kind of work became the rage, both in France and England..."

The French Exposition of Industry of 1844 was a grand spectacle, a sort of World's Fair. One conjectures that the tatting exhibited there was Old Style Tatting like that shown in the blog header above, since these comments imply that tatting had evolved from mere edgings to motifs and larger pieces. Did that change originate in France? Who knows? It would seem to have flourished there and spread to England anyway.

There was a book published, Exposition de l’industrie française année 1844, by Jules Burat, with 90 plates illustrating the exhibits. Unfortunately, I don't know if it pictured any of the tatting since I haven't found a copy online. Here is a list of libraries with copies. Field trip! If anyone manages a peek at this, let the rest of us know.

Meanwhile, I wonder, were there patterns for this style of tatting published in France? For that matter, what books were published in France in the 1800's with tatting of any sort? I know of these: Manuel des demoiselles, ou Arts et métiers qui leur conviennent et dont elles peuvent s'occuper avec agrément : tels que la couture, la broderie, le tricot (1830)and Leçons de couture, crochet, tricot, frivolité, guipure sur filet, passementerie et tapisserie (1873). Dillmont published several books beginning around the turn of the century. Can anyone tell me of any more?

-Update- Click HERE for a link to Manuel des Demoiselles (1830). The word "frivolite" appears on pages 53 and 109. And click HERE, HERE and HERE for the illustrations, but be aware the illustrations are from a different edition and numbered differently.

Here is what freetranslation.com has to say about the page at the top of this post:

This embellishment kind, that holds at once festoon and net, appears me to have to be here. To make it, it is necessary to have a sort of big shuttle in ivory: the round party is the one where one enters cotton, that one unwinds around on the part full. When there is enough do cotton unwound, one takes the end between the index and the left thumb: at the same time one seizes the shuttle of the upright hand. The other fingers of the left held remote hands, his surround by cotton, and the tool is passed underneath the thread, so as to form a point of festoon. One squeezes this point, but not so as to prevent the cotton that holds the shuttle to flow freely. One determined in advance the number of necessary points to the larger of which one wants to do frivolité. It is on the held thread of the left hand that form themselves these points: this is the track. The thread be anxious the shuttle, and by consequent of the upright hand, squeezes itself to every point, of which the determined quantity produces a lace more or less big, but similar to a festoon lace to day and cut. That goes a lot more quickly than the frivolité to the needle.

An Example of Old Style Tatting

I was recently fortunate to acquire this piece of old style tatting. Isn't it lovely? I wonder what its original purpose may have been, since it's an odd shape.

It has many of the classic features of old style tatting that were used before the invention of the join:

Sections tied together with knots...


Strips of rings sewn together by their picots...


Needle weaving inside the figures.


These rings of the outer round look sewn on rather than using lock joins as we would do today.


This square motif is very pretty.




And lastly, we have...tatted chains??

Well, there are several possibilities here. Before the invention of the true tatted chain, there was what Elgiva Nicholls called the false chain, where stitches were sewn over a core thread, similar to working buttonhole stitches. But in the examples I have seen (not that I've seen everything!) this was used to cover the bare thread between rings, not the border-like effect here.

Or, (wild flight of fancy alert), an isolated tatter somewhere could have figured out how to work a chain by herself before the method was published and popularized.

Or, in the mid 1800's a tatter could have been content with the old style methods she had been using all her life, and adopted just one of those new-fangled ideas that were coming into vogue.

Have any of you seen this sort of chains(?) mixed into old style work? I'd love to see.

Old Style Tatting

Old Style Tatting is the expression I use for that early work from before the invention of the join. (Does it have any other proper name?) Motifs were joined by tying the picots together. The motifs themselves were made up of strips of tatting sewn together. Elgiva Nicholls describes the process in her book, Tatting Techniques. Butterick's Tatting and Netting of 1896 has instructions for this type of work (though not too detailed), with patterns based on studying examples of tatting that were already old at the time.

Make a strip of rings, leaving a long tail of thread at the beginning. Have a bare thread double the length of the picots between rings.

Then use that beginning tail of thread to sew the rings together. The last picot of one ring and the first picot of the next one are caught together in a little knot. Then the thread ties into the base of the next ring, sometimes fastening it to a picot of a ring of an inner round. Needle lace stitches often fill in the centers. Then many motifs are basted down onto paper to hold them in place while knots are tied to join them together.

This one little motif took me a long, long time to make. I'm sure those tatters of old, who were accustomed to this sort of work could do it much faster. Still, with the effort involved, I'm amazed tatting as an art survived until the join was invented to make it easier.

But wasn't that old style work lovely!