Overview

In its lace making heyday in the late eighteenth century, Ipswich, Massachusetts boasted 600 lace makers in a town of only 6OI households. Marta Cotterell Raffel's study is the first to focus specifically on the Ipswich lace industry in the wider world of eighteenth-century work. She explores how lacemakers learned their skills and how they combined a traditional lace making education with attention to market-driven changes in style. She shows how the tools of lacemaking were intrinsic parts of the craft, and how the shawls, bonnets, and capes created by the lacemakers designated the social class, and sometimes even the political affiliation, of those that wore them. With extensive research based on hundreds of previously unseen artifacts and documents, Raffel shows how this preindustrial labor and craft - absolutely central to the economic health of Ipswich - created and sustained forms of early American culture such as fashion and political symbolism, and shaped an entire community for several generations.

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9781584651635

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Marta Cotterell Raffel is a lace maker who learned the craft over the course of ten years from some of the most skilled people in the field. She has published essays about Ipswich lace in Antiques and Civilization Magazine, and lectured on the topic at the Heard House in Ipswich, Massachusetts, the Peabody Essex Museum, and the Dublin Seminar, among others. Her research for this book was partially supported by the Great Lakes Lace Guild and the Chesapeake Region Lace Guild.

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