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Photograph by Skye Dunlap
Museum manager Ruth Roller lays out a lace made to commemorate the allies of World War I.
Lace Museum keeps old craft alive
By Kelly Wilkinson
Gracie Larsen, a self-proclaimed fiberholic, is standing in a large room of delicate and frothy lace samples that is the Sunnyvale Lace Museum, explaining how lace variations spread.
"Well, before we had Woman's Day and other magazines that had patterns in them, women made sample books," she says, pointing to hand-made books full of small squares of lace. "And if Ethel had something in there that Mary liked, then Mary would have to sit with her for a while and learn what Ethel was doing."
Larsen is the co-founder and one of the principal volunteers at the Lace Museum, a teaching center housing samples of laces that have been donated over the years--mostly from individuals and families. And it's her week to oversee the museum and share her insights with visitors.
There are seven basic techniques in lace making, she explains, including tatting, bobbin, Irish, needle and crochet lace. These have spawned hundreds and maybe even thousands of different subtle variations--some are what Larsen calls "kissing cousins," laces that are made through a marriage of two closely related techniques.
Larsen describes such varieties of needlework as "steps in the educational process, and stepping stones to the next kind of lace."
Larsen has been doing this since the early '80s, when she and fellow lacer Cherie Helm dreamed up the concept of housing a collection of lace.
"I have a large collection of lace and had been wondering what to do with it for a number of years," Helm said. "So when [Larsen] mentioned the museum, I thought 'Hey, with my lace and her idea, we've got a winner.' "
That was in 1976, and it was 1981 when they officially became a non-profit organization, operating out of a vacant store in Mountain View's Old Mill building. Then in 1996, Larsen and Helm moved the museum to its current location--a mirror-tinted storefront in a modest South Murphy Avenue strip mall.
Since then, they've formed a guild that meets monthly to exchange tips and patterns. The Lace Museum hosts lectures and more than a half-dozen lace classes for a small fee. This income and donations defray rental costs.
Larsen said the museum has touted itself as the only lace museum in the county, "and so far no one has come out from under a hole to tell us differently."
"We're just trying to keep the whole thing alive and pass it onto the next generation," Larsen says. "And you can't do much more than that."
While Larsen admits that lace making can seem impenetrable to those who haven't tried it before and carries old-fashioned connotations, she isn't worried that it will die out anytime soon.
"It's always been quietly just doing its thing, and hasn't gone away yet," Larsen says.
Customer Helen Coughlin found the Lace Museum through a pamphlet at a yarn store in San Jose. Already familiar with detailed manual work through translating books into Braille, she says she initially became interested in learning how to make lace on a trip to Holland in 1984.
"There were these little old ladies in the windows making lace, and ever since then, I've been trying to find books or anything to teach me about it," Coughlin says.
She finally found the books and encouragement she needed in the museum's gift store in December, and since then has fashioned her own bobbins out of dowel rods at home and is teaching herself.
Coughlin came to the museum today to get advice from the lace connoisseurs, who have spread their projects out on the large table in the center of the room. As she examines the needlework on the table, Coughlin acknowledges that breaking into the finely detailed world of lace making was intimidating.
"The first time I came here and saw all these wonderful things, I thought it was too much for me," she says. "But it just takes getting over the mental block. It could take years, but once you do and you try it, you feel so good and capable."
Larsen says her route to lace making was inevitable, with a dressmaker for a mother.
"[My mother] used to tell me I was a fiberholic from the very beginning because even when I was very young, she said I had to touch absolutely every piece of fabric," she says. "I guess I just like tactile things, and the feel of the thread going through my hands."
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Sunnyvale, California Since 1994
