At The Lace Museum, you will find a place to explore all things lace—virtually and in person. Our on-site collections preserve over 10,000 pieces of timeless antique lace, thousands of lacemaking tools, a dedicated research library, and an archive of lace-related documents, samples, and ephemera. You will enjoy a mix of historic and contemporary displays available through our website and within the museum itself. We offer workshops in most lacemaking techniques, as well as in the history, identification, collection, and preservation of antique lace—delivered on-site, online or on-demand.

If threads could talk, what stories would they tell? The Lace Museum in Silicon Valley and lace historian and author Elizabeth Kurella have published Reading Lace, a new series of online/on-demand videos to bring beginners up to speed on recognizing and separating the extraordinary from the ordinary, and revealing secrets of times, places and values.

Lace, one of the most overlooked areas of antiques, includes some of the oldest and most authentically human and story-rich of all. Lace has been considered too good to throw away since the times of Sir Walter Raleigh, when Gros Point de Venise was the lace of choice to wear with a suit of armor, through the early twentieth century when our grandmothers tatted and crocheted edges for our “for show” handkerchiefs. Those lace collars, handkerchiefs, flounces and fans and everything in between can be found today in drawers, attics, and auctions – which the internet brings to everyone around the world.

But few today know how to recognize or judge remarkable, story-filled old lace.

The series uses the analogy of learning to read lace as we read language. Both language and lace take small individual units and build them up into meaningful structures. Both have, over the centuries, evolved in appearance, usage and meaning. Both provide ways to view and appreciate our place in society and history.

The series includes four roughly hour-long introductory level video lessons:

1: Understanding and Reading Lace – an overview studying lace at multiple levels – thread manipulations, motifs or bits and pieces and then the actual object – reveals details that tell what most want to know about lace – how, when and here it was made, and perhaps an idea of what it is worth.

2: The Alphabet of Lace – Individual thread manipulations or stitches are the letters of the alphabet of lace. Here we explore the basic kinds of thread manipulations – the building blocks of lace – and how they are the foundation for understanding how to identify and study lace.

3: The Words of Lace – The first part of this lesson shows how thread manipulations are combined to form bits and pieces – the words of lace. Then we consider how we might communicate information about those bits and pieces to others, by putting names to the bits of lace.

4: The Sentences and Stories of Lace – This final lesson in reading lace explains how all the pieces come together, and how we can use all the clues we can find in lace to read the stories in lace

Now an international online resource for the study of lace, The Lace Museum in Silicon Valley was founded in 1976 in the San Francisco Bay Area in California to educate the community about the fine art of lace making through exhibits, shows and community events. It currently offers an extensive list of online classes in studies of antique lace and lacemaking worldwide.

Elizabeth Kurella is the author of Guide to Lace and Linens, Secrets of Real Lace, Anybody Can Mend Lace and Linens as well as other articles and books. She has been teaching an online series of Studies in Antique Lace for The Lace Museum for the past several years.

“The Lace Museum is proud to expand its digital presence, sharing the artistry and magic of antique lace while honoring and sustaining the traditions that shaped it,” says Director Kim Davis.

How to purchase individual lessons or the entire series can be found at https://thelacemuseum.org/videos-on-demand/