[Illustration: VENISE DESIGNS BY THE BRUSSELS LACE COMMITTEE]
Colette had not woven the roses, for because of the difficulty in making it, workers usually specialize on the various individual parts composing this extremely popular lace. A second girl had made the flowers, and a third the exquisite open-work details introduced to lighten the whole. Considerable freedom is allowed the lace-worker in the execution of these open-work stitches. If she has talent she may obtain many interesting original results in filling in, for there is apparently no limit to the number of stitches she may employ. In Colette’s little handkerchief square, I discovered miniature marguerites and stars and airy balls. Each group had been made by a specialist (many women have spent their lives in making just tiny stars or wheels), and sent to the convent to be bound together with the leaves and roses into a beautiful whole by the clear mesh that dropt hexagon by hexagon from Colette’s swift needle.
[Illustration: HANDKERCHIEF AND JEWEL BOXES, FLANDERS AND VENISE OVER SATIN AND VELVET]
Colette’s neighbor was making the same mesh, but as a background for bobbin-made clusters, sent here from a bobbin-lace village to make the rare Point d’Angleterre, a small quantity of which Kerxken still produces.
In the corner of this class-room were the shelves with the essential skeins of thread; cotton for the Needle Point, linen for the Venise. The linen is more and more difficult to obtain, and since it is hard to handle and breaks easily, has been largely supplanted by cotton thread. There were large cardboard boxes for the drawings and the pricked working patterns; others for the little bobbin-lace roses and leaves and vines that were to be worked into Brussels Point; and still more boxes for the finished meters and insets ready to be sold to the Committee, and later to the dealer who will replace the Committee. While we were examining the boxes a pretty, dark-haired dentellière of about sixteen came in, with work she had finished at home, two handkerchiefs with Brussels Point borders, and two and a half meters of Venise, on which she had worked five and a half months and for which she asked 160 francs, or $40.00.