Free Monica Ferris_Needlecraft Mysteries_02 by Framed in Lace Page B

twisted and crossed over like bobbin lace.”
    Jessica asked, “How sure can you be? Couldn’t it be something else? Tatting, maybe? Or crochet?”
    Alice looked sharply at Jessica, then said with an air of being patient with her, “No, it’s not the loop, loop, loop of crochet.” She looked at the blank faces of the other women and continued, “If you found the end of this and pulled, it wouldn’t all come undone, would it? So it’s not crochet. And it’s not tatting, I can’t see anything like those circles you get in tatting. But there are twists and weaving in it, and they look like bobbin lace patterns to me.” She bent over the fragment under glass again, this time so closely there was barely room for the magnifying glass. “Here, for example, this must have been ground. And here, what do you think, Patricia, the petal of a flower, maybe?”
    Patricia looked, the small neatness of her a strong contrast to the large woman bent over the glass. “I see what you mean, I think.”
    Alice said, pointing with a thick forefinger, “But all along here, the threads have been broken. And here, see how it’s pulled; this thread is thinned out to nothing here and here it’s thicker and there it’s thin again. Same with these. I never saw thread do that before.”
    She looked accusingly at Malloy, who shrugged. “It’s silk, if that’s any help. A textile expert says if you put animal fibers under pressure under water for a long time, they will stretch. And silk’s from worms, which are animals.”
    Patricia, still looking at the sample, nodded. “You know, I think you’re right, Alice; it’s not just pulled crosswise, the thread itself is stretched, and not evenly.”
    Alice said, “Yes, that alone makes it impossible to see what the pattern was.” She moved the magnifying glass along the fabric. “Though here, I think this was a line of picots. I don’t think this was torchon. Hmmm, binche?”
    â€œBench?” echoed Betsy.
    â€œNo, binche, a kind of bobbin lace. Well, maybe not. It’s too damaged to tell for sure.” She put the magnifying glass down and sat back again. “That’s all I can tell you.”
    Malloy said, notebook in hand, “But you’re absolutely sure it’s bobbin lace?” Alice nodded, and he wrote that down. “Is that a common kind of thing? I mean, lots of women knit and crochet. Do lots of women do bobbin lace?”
    â€œNo,” Alice said.
    â€œThe question is,” said Betsy, “did women make bobbin lace back in 1949?”
    â€œOh, yes,” nodded Alice. “I was making it back then, and I wasn’t the only one. I learned it as a child; my Grandma brought it from the old country. My mother wasn’t interested, so Grandma taught me. It’s very difficult to learn from a book, you just about have to have someone show you, so I doubt there’s been a time since it was invented hundreds and hundreds of years ago that someone hasn’t been doing it.”
    â€œSo I guess the patterns have all been passed along, too,” said Betsy.
    Alice nodded. “Of course, you can make up your own, too. Some people make lace into pictures, like of flowers or animals or trees. You can take a picture with a nice, easy outline, like from a coloring book, and make it into lace. I once saw a Batman, the lace maker handled the cape real nice, all lines and shading. But mostly you do geometrical patterns, repeats of flowers or leaves.”
    â€œWere more women or fewer doing it back then?”
    Alice considered for a bit. “Fewer, I think. There’s a trend back to handmade just now, so more women are learning how to do these things. There’s someone teaching it locally. She holds a regular class at Ingebretsen’s in Minneapolis.”
    â€œIs there something about the way people do this stuff,”