Create
Create
Many techniques used to create clothes and accessories required hours of painstaking work by hand.
There are countless different techniques used in fashion which show the high level of skill and creativity that goes into making many items. Although accessories are now usually machine-made, there is still demand for handmade pieces.
Object in focus: A fantastic fan
In the late eighteenth century when Queen Victoria was on the throne, the swish and swoosh of an elegant fan would have been a familiar sound.
But a great deal of work and many different skills would have gone into creating the stylish look of fans and especially this beautiful example which dates to around 1890. At least eight different people, some of them women, would have used different skills to produce a fan like this one.
The look of the fan was decided by a fan designer and this would have been passed to the craft people who made the separate elements.
Mother of pearl and lace fan ©The Salisbury Museum collection
This fan is made from a combination of two types of lace called bobbin and needle lace called Brussels mixed lace.
The design would have been broken up into different elements and given to a lace pattern maker who would have made the pattern or ‘pricking’.
Then a needle lace worker would have made the central floral motif and a separate bobbin lace worker would have made the other motifs.
The intricate pieces of lace would have then been passed onto the ‘assembler’ who would have had the job of putting them together using plaits made from four stands of cotton using a bobbin.
Alongside this lace work would be the person who made the sticks for the fan, which would have been painstakingly made from mother of pearl and then inlaid with gold.
The last person involved in the making of the fan would have been the fan maker, who assembled all these carefully crafted pieces into the object.