---
title: "Chemical lace"
description: "Chemical lace is machine embroidery on a ground that is later dissolved, leaving the embroidery as a lace with no net behind it."
type: Glossary
url: https://teazle.art/glossary/chemical-lace
published: 2026-10-17
updated: 2026-10-17
author: "The Teazle editors"
---

# Chemical lace

*Chemical lace is machine embroidery on a ground that is later dissolved, leaving the embroidery as a lace with no net behind it.*

Chemical lace is machine embroidery on a ground that is later dissolved. The design is stitched in cotton on a silk ground, and the silk is removed with caustic soda or chlorine, leaving only the cotton embroidery. It is also called burnt-out, aetzed or Swiss lace.

When was it developed?

The Textile Research Centre in Leiden says it developed in Germany and Switzerland in the 1880s, as an offshoot of machine embroidery, and that it let machines imitate needle lace. The Fitzwilliam Museum catalogues late-nineteenth-century examples, dated about 1880 to 1899, and describes the background material as dissolved or corroded away by chlorine or caustic soda. The [Schiffli](https://teazle.art/glossary/schiffli-embroidery-machine.md) machine became the main tool for making it.

How do you recognize it?

It can imitate needle, bobbin and Irish crochet lace and looks convincing from a distance. Up close, Leiden says, the most obvious sign is general fuzziness, with no clear stitches or individual threads to follow. Handmade needle lace is built of buttonhole stitches, where the embroidery machine makes small zigzag lockstitches. In Leiden's comparison pairs the bars connecting motifs were loose and lacked a common structure, and raised work lay on the same surface as the rest of the pattern.


## Sources

1. [1625 Chemical lace](https://www.trc-leiden.nl/trc/index.php/nl/textiel-momenten/1625-chemical-lace). Textile Research Centre, Leiden
2. [Fragment of chemical lace, T.60-1974](https://data.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk/id/object/110128). Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge
3. [Lace Identification: 7 Examples](https://www.trc-leiden.nl/trc-digital-exhibition/index.php/lace-identification-7-examples). Textile Research Centre, Leiden

Canonical: https://teazle.art/glossary/chemical-lace