---
title: "Handmade or Machine? How to Read a Piece of Lace"
description: "Handmade lace is built thread by thread, so threads follow the design and edges grow with the piece; machine lace imitates it, but ground, edge and back differ."
type: Technique
url: https://teazle.art/techniques/handmade-or-machine-how-to-read-lace
published: 2026-10-17
updated: 2026-10-17
author: "The Teazle editors"
image: https://cdn.sanity.io/images/jvxyxtrt/production/4b14a14a3fc54bccb3a98943464b5567e848c966-1880x392.jpg?w=1600&fit=max&q=78&auto=format
image_license: CC0
---

# Handmade or Machine? How to Read a Piece of Lace

*How can you tell if lace is handmade or machine made? A field guide to threads, grounds, edges and outlines, from needle and bobbin lace to Leavers net, Schiffli embroidery and chemical lace.*

![A narrow strip of cream bobbin lace. Scrolling stems and solid leaf-like patches are separated by irregular open holes, with a small toothed edge along the bottom, shown against a gray background.](https://cdn.sanity.io/images/jvxyxtrt/production/4b14a14a3fc54bccb3a98943464b5567e848c966-1880x392.jpg?w=1280&fit=max&q=78&auto=format)
*Bobbin lace, 18th century. 14 x 3 in. (35.6 x 7.6 cm). The Met, 10.146.3–.6, .9. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. CC0*

To tell handmade lace from machine lace, follow the threads. In handmade lace they trace the shapes of the pattern, and the edge grows together with the piece. In a machine imitation the threads tend to run in parallel, the meshes repeat identically, and the edge or outline is often added separately. No single sign settles the question, and the Textile Research Centre in Leiden warns that good imitations can be very difficult to tell from their handmade models.

![A narrow strip of cream bobbin lace. Scrolling stems and solid leaf-like patches are separated by irregular open holes, with a small toothed edge along the bottom, shown against a gray background.](https://cdn.sanity.io/images/jvxyxtrt/production/4b14a14a3fc54bccb3a98943464b5567e848c966-1880x392.jpg?w=1280&fit=max&q=78&auto=format)
*Bobbin lace, 18th century. 14 x 3 in. (35.6 x 7.6 cm). The Met, 10.146.3–.6, .9. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. CC0*

The question has a date attached. From 14 November 2026 to 11 April 2027, [The Bowes Museum](https://thebowesmuseum.org.uk/exhibitions/lace-and-legacy-fashion-treasures-from-the-blackborne-collection/) in County Durham shows *Lace and Legacy*, built on the Blackborne Collection: the stock and study collection of the Victorian dealers Anthony and Arthur Blackborne, given to the museum in 2006. The Leiden centre counts some 7,000 pieces and notes that the firm sold modern lace as well as antique lace. A dealer had to know which was which. This guide shows how to look, using Met objects you can zoom into yourself.

## What is the difference between needle lace, bobbin lace and machine lace?

[Needle lace](https://teazle.art/glossary/needle-lace.md) is made with a single thread and one needle. [Bobbin lace](https://teazle.art/glossary/bobbin-lace.md) is made by manipulating many threads wound on bobbins. These are the two main families of handmade lace. Machine lace, made on powered equipment, appeared from the end of the eighteenth century and imitates both.

Needle lace is built from looped stitches, mostly buttonhole stitch, and its motifs are often outlined with a raised rim. A nineteenth-century needlework dictionary describes that rim as closely buttonholed over a padding of coarse thread, so its thickness depends on how much padding was run in. Bobbin lace is made over a pattern drawn on card and pricked with holes, pinned to a pillow. The lacemaker twists and crosses pairs of bobbins, setting pins as the work grows. It comes in two main forms: continuous lace, where ground and motifs are worked in one go, and non-continuous lace, where separate sprigs are made and then joined by bars or sewn onto a mesh.

![Black-and-white photograph of a wide border of heavy needle lace: padded, raised scrolls and flowers, with small net-like patches inside the shapes, joined by bars and with a small beaded edge along both sides.](https://cdn.sanity.io/images/jvxyxtrt/production/ed7f722cbaacee31c2ee97da281be1c96fdf2a91-940x537.jpg?w=1280&fit=max&q=78&auto=format)
*Gros point needle lace border, third quarter of the 17th century. 120 1/2 x 8 in. (306.1 x 20.3 cm). The Met, 33.90.35. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. CC0*

## How did machines learn to imitate handmade lace?

The first machine laces were plain net made from one continuous thread, with the pattern added by hand. Patterned machine lace followed from around 1840 and could imitate handwork closely. The sequence is worth knowing, because each machine leaves its own mark on the cloth.

| Date | What happened | What it leaves behind |
| --- | --- | --- |
| 1808–09 | John Heathcoat patents a bobbin net machine; an improved version of 1809 is known as the "Old Loughborough" | Machine-made net with a regular mesh |
| 1813 | John Levers builds a single-tier version in a Nottingham garret; it is never patented | The [Leavers machine](glossary:glossary-leavers-lace), which imitates bobbin lace |
| c. 1835–40 | Jacquard punched cards and pierced bars let machines make patterned lace | Net and pattern made in one process |
| 1863–64 | Isaak Gröbli builds the first [Schiffli](glossary:glossary-schiffli-embroidery-machine) embroidery machine in Switzerland | Machine embroidery with a lockstitch |
| 1880s | Embroidery on a dissolvable ground becomes [chemical lace](glossary:glossary-chemical-lace) | Lace with no net or ground thread at all |

Heathcoat's story has a violent chapter. On the night of 28 June 1816 an armed gang attacked his Loughborough factory, destroyed fifty-five frames and burned the lace on them. He moved the business to a mill at Tiverton in Devon. Levers, by contrast, worked secretly and did not patent his machine, according to William Felkin's 1867 history of the trade. Felkin also records how good the best nets became: he calls one 1822 machine net "scarcely distinguishable from pillow work in the mesh."

## What should you look for under a loupe?

Check five things: the filling, the outline thread (gimp), the ground, the edge and the two sides. These are the categories the Textile Research Centre uses in a digital exhibition that sets seven handmade laces beside machine copies. Use a loupe or a phone's macro mode, good light and a dark cloth behind the lace.

| Feature | Handmade bobbin lace | Machine imitation |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Solid areas (filling) | Clear passage of threads that follow the shape; pinholes around the solid parts | Threads more parallel, V-shaped movements, hard to trace, no pinholes |
| Outline (gimp) | Outlines the pattern and shows on both sides | Often absent, or only on the front; may have been darned in by hand |
| Ground | Slightly irregular, with a twist in the hexagonal mesh | Meshes look identical across large plain areas; one side of each mesh may be a V-shaped stitch |
| Edge | Scallops and picots made together with the lace | Straight, produced separately and added later |
| Sides | Same on both sides | A distinct front and back, shown by a raised gimp |

Read the table as odds, not rules. The Leiden curators also record a black [Chantilly](https://teazle.art/glossary/chantilly-lace.md) copy made on the Pusher machine, which "perfectly imitates" the handmade ground and looks the same from both sides, and an outline darned in by hand that looks like the real thing. Where black lace like this was worn, see [Victorian mourning dress](/techniques/victorian-mourning-dress-crape-and-stages), whose later stages admitted lace. Repeats are a weak test too. Bobbin lacemakers work from a pricked pattern, so a motif recurs by design. Look instead at what happens inside each repeat.

![A strip of fine net whose even mesh runs in diagonal bands, with a scalloped border of heart-shaped motifs filled with smaller net patterns along the lower edge, on a dark blue mount.](https://cdn.sanity.io/images/jvxyxtrt/production/1a372cace6b4ae5fc1fe44ba15e85ef49defca0f-680x165.jpg?w=1280&fit=max&q=78&auto=format)
*Tulle, 19th century. Machine net. 14 x 3 in. (35.6 x 7.6 cm). The Met, 08.180.828. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. CC0*

The machine net above is catalogued by the Met as "Tulle", and a [tulle](https://teazle.art/glossary/tulle.md) ground can be machine made or handmade, according to Leiden. Its even mesh runs in diagonal bands. That regularity over a wide plain area is the kind of evidence to look for, and handmade grounds tend to be less even.

## How do you spot Schiffli and chemical lace?

Chemical lace, also called burnt-out or Swiss lace, is machine embroidery on a ground that is later dissolved. It was developed in Germany and Switzerland in the 1880s. A cotton design is stitched on silk, and caustic soda or chlorine removes the silk, leaving the cotton design behind. The Fitzwilliam Museum catalogues a fragment dated about 1880 to 1899 as chemical lace.

The tell is the stitch. Needle lace is made of buttonhole stitches. The embroidery machine instead makes small zigzag lockstitches, because the Schiffli machine, built by Gröbli in 1863–64, carries a continuous needle thread on top and a bobbin in a shuttle underneath. Leiden describes chemical lace as looking neat from a distance but fuzzy at the outlines under magnification, with no clear stitches or individual threads to follow.

In Leiden's pairs, a handmade Venetian-style needle lace has bars that look "solid and regular", with even buttonhole edges, while the chemical lace's bars are loose and lack a common structure. The raised work in the machine copy is rows of dense stitches lying on the same surface as the rest of the pattern. In the handmade piece it is a separate layer on top. The sides test is unreliable here: one of Leiden's chemical laces has a distinct front, another does not.

## What do ground, toile, cordonnet and picot mean?

- **Ground:** the groundwork of the lace, which supports and surrounds the pattern. A nineteenth-century dictionary gives the French terms *fond* and *champ* for it, and a mesh ground is a réseau.
- **Toile:** in lace, the solid pattern worked on the ground. The word has a different meaning in tailoring, where a toile is a trial garment.
- **Cordonnet and gimp:** the thread that outlines the motifs. In needle lace it is a raised, buttonholed [cordonnet](https://teazle.art/glossary/cordonnet.md). Leiden uses *gimp* for the outline thread seen mostly in bobbin lace.
- **Picot:** a small loop on the edge of lace. A [picot](https://teazle.art/glossary/picot.md) can be made as part of the lace or sewn on separately, which is why its construction helps date and identify a piece.

## What can fool you?

Hybrids are the main trap. Leiden's reference pages describe hand-stitched designs on machine net, and its exhibition shows machine lace with a hand-darned outline.

- **Handwork on machine net.** Embroidered net laces such as Limerick and Coggeshall use machine-made net with a hand-worked design. The net itself may be hand-knotted filet instead, the same net as in the pattern chart discussed in [This Lion Is 59 Meshes Tall](/finds/vinciolo-lion-1588), also known as [lacis](https://teazle.art/glossary/lacis.md).
- **Appliqué on net.** In appliqué net lace, handmade motifs are stitched onto a net. Early examples used handmade net, later ones tend to use machine net, and machine copies of muslin appliqué were widely made in Switzerland by the later nineteenth century.
- **Tape lace.** In North America, tape lace made from machine-woven tape is sometimes called Honiton. Real Honiton lace, Leiden notes, is made with bobbins.
- **Alterations.** The Bowes Museum calls a 1635 cloak band "thought to be the only example of this style that is genuine and unaltered", Alteration is a fair question to ask of any old piece.
- **Photographs.** The two Met pieces below are both sheer nets with floral sprays. The Met catalogs the first as machine net and the second as bobbin lace. Both carry a "Purchase by subscription, 1909" credit, and the records give only the medium and a century. From a photograph alone you cannot tell what did the work in the flowers; the lace in your hand can.
![A wide flounce of fine sheer net, scattered with small floral sprigs above and with larger sprays of flowers and leaves, trailing stems and a scalloped border below, all in cream thread on gray.](https://cdn.sanity.io/images/jvxyxtrt/production/22c3b5b8fad9eb02c93b2c0fab1a69e52b96a692-680x557.jpg?w=1280&fit=max&q=78&auto=format)
*Flounce, 19th century. Machine net. 51 x 21 in. (129.5 x 53.3 cm). The Met, 09.68.408. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. CC0*

![A wide border of sheer net with rows of small daisy-like dots above and a band of leaf sprays and large flowers in cream thread along a scalloped lower edge, on gray.](https://cdn.sanity.io/images/jvxyxtrt/production/a19e23b96396bcd97c164ddf6f503c0fe9cf8e09-680x313.jpg?w=1280&fit=max&q=78&auto=format)
*Silk bobbin lace border, 19th century. 45 x 8 in. (114.3 x 20.3 cm). The Met, 09.68.409. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. CC0*

The Met's 1909 subscription is connected to the Blackborne story: its *Bulletin* of that year reports that the museum acquired the Blackborne Collection soon after a subscription list opened. The object records for these two pieces do not name the dealer, so no link is claimed here.

## What is a quick checklist for handmade or machine?

1. **Turn it over.** Does the outline thread show on both sides, or only the front? Equal sides point to bobbin lace, though some machine laces and chemical laces also look the same on both sides.
2. **Trace a thread.** In a solid area, can you follow single threads around the shape? Parallel, V-shaped runs point to a machine.
3. **Look for pinholes.** Small holes around the edges of solid parts suggest bobbin lace worked on a pricked pattern.
4. **Check the stitches.** Buttonhole loops suggest needle lace. Small even lockstitches and a fuzzy outline suggest chemical lace.
5. **Compare the mesh.** Identical meshes across a large plain area favor a machine. Slight irregularity favors a hand, but machines copied that too.
6. **Inspect the edge.** Picots grown with the piece favor handwork. A straight edge attached separately favors a machine.
7. **Ask whether the outline was darned in.** If one part looks handmade and the rest does not, you may have a hybrid.
8. **Weigh the evidence.** Two or three consistent signs are a good indication. Mixed signs mean a hybrid, a repair or a case for a specialist.

## Where can you see handmade and machine lace side by side?

The Textile Research Centre's online exhibition *Lace Identification: 7 Examples* pairs a handmade and a machine-made lace in each case, with detail photographs. The Bowes Museum's *Lace and Legacy* runs until 11 April 2027. The Met's online collection includes many lace records with public-domain images, including the needle, bobbin and machine pieces shown here.


## Sources

1. [Lace Identification: 7 Examples (cover page, chapters 1-7, terminology)](https://www.trc-leiden.nl/trc-digital-exhibition/index.php/lace-identification-7-examples). Textile Research Centre, Leiden
2. [A History of the Machine-Wrought Hosiery and Lace Manufactures (1867)](https://archive.org/details/historyofmachine00felkuoft). William Felkin
3. [The Dictionary of Needlework (1882)](https://archive.org/details/dictionaryofneed001caul). Caulfeild and Saward
4. [Bobbin lace; Appliqué net lace; Embroidered net lace; Tape lace; Lace](https://trc-leiden.nl/trc-needles/techniques/lace-making/bobbin-lace). Textile Research Centre, Leiden
5. [1625 Chemical lace](https://www.trc-leiden.nl/trc/index.php/nl/textiel-momenten/1625-chemical-lace). Textile Research Centre, Leiden
6. [Fragment of chemical lace, T.60-1974](https://data.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk/id/object/110128). Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge
7. [Gröbli, Isaak](https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/030313/). Historisches Lexikon der Schweiz
8. [Schiffli Embroidery Machine](https://www.trc-leiden.nl/trc-needles/tools/embroidery/schiffli-embroidery-machine). Textile Research Centre, Leiden
9. [John Heathcoat 1783-1861](https://www.knittingtogether.org.uk/behind-the-scenes/the-people/john-heathcoat-1783-1861). Knitting Together (Heathcoat Fabrics)
10. [Lace and Legacy: Fashion Treasures from The Blackborne Collection](https://thebowesmuseum.org.uk/exhibitions/lace-and-legacy-fashion-treasures-from-the-blackborne-collection/). The Bowes Museum
11. [The Blackborne Lace Collection](https://thebowesmuseum.org.uk/collections/blackborne-lace-collection/). The Bowes Museum
12. [A. Blackborne & Company](https://www.trc-leiden.nl/trc-needles/organisations-and-movements/companies/a-blackborne-company). Textile Research Centre, Leiden
13. [The Blackborne Collection of Lace (May 1909)](https://archive.org/details/jstor-3253278). Bulletin of the Metropolitan Museum of Art
14. [Bobbin lace, 10.146.3-.6, .9](https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/218897). The Metropolitan Museum of Art
15. [Gros point needle lace border, 33.90.35](https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/222726). The Metropolitan Museum of Art
16. [Tulle, 08.180.828](https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/215179). The Metropolitan Museum of Art
17. [Flounce, 09.68.408](https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/218353). The Metropolitan Museum of Art
18. [Silk bobbin lace border, 09.68.409](https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/218354). The Metropolitan Museum of Art
19. [Lace machine; Bobbinet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lace_machine). Wikipedia

## Glossary

- [Needle lace](https://teazle.art/glossary/needle-lace.md): Needle lace is lace built up stitch by stitch with a needle and a single thread, usually over a design laid down on parchment or fabric.
- [Bobbin lace](https://teazle.art/glossary/bobbin-lace.md): Bobbin lace is lace made by twisting and crossing many threads wound on bobbins, worked over a pricked pattern pinned to a pillow.
- [Tulle](https://teazle.art/glossary/tulle.md): Tulle is a lightweight, very fine net fabric, used for veils, ballet skirts and layered evening dress.
- [Chantilly lace](https://teazle.art/glossary/chantilly-lace.md): Chantilly lace is a fine bobbin lace, usually black silk, with floral designs outlined in a thicker thread on a delicate net ground.
- [Lacis](https://teazle.art/glossary/lacis.md): Lacis, also called filet lace, is lace made by darning a pattern with thread into a net of small knotted square meshes.
- [Cordonnet](https://teazle.art/glossary/cordonnet.md): Cordonnet is the thread that outlines the motifs of a lace; in needle lace it is a raised, closely buttonholed rim worked over padding.
- [Picot](https://teazle.art/glossary/picot.md): A picot is a small loop worked along the edge of lace or fabric, either made with the piece or sewn on separately.
- [Leavers lace](https://teazle.art/glossary/leavers-lace.md): Leavers lace is machine-made lace produced on the machine John Levers built in Nottingham in 1813, a version of Heathcoat's bobbin net machine.
- [Chemical lace](https://teazle.art/glossary/chemical-lace.md): Chemical lace is machine embroidery on a ground that is later dissolved, leaving the embroidery as a lace with no net behind it.
- [Schiffli embroidery machine](https://teazle.art/glossary/schiffli-embroidery-machine.md): The Schiffli machine, first built in Switzerland by Isaak Gröbli in 1863–64, embroiders with a needle thread above and a shuttle bobbin below.

Canonical: https://teazle.art/techniques/handmade-or-machine-how-to-read-lace