LACE FROM INDIA

Timaru Herald, Volume CXLV, Issue 21280, 25 February 1939, Page 20

LACE FROM INDIA

A GROWING INDUSTRY Gandhi’s emphasis on India’s need for village industries has thrown light upon a little-known Industry amongst women villagers in Travancore who a hundred and twenty years ago were taught to make hand lace by an English woman missionary, states the “Manchester Guardian.” The present director of the industry has lately been in this country Interesting groups of women in Britain in many beautiful specimens of hand-made lace. The original teacher came from Buckinghamshire and taught patterns she had seen worked in cottages in her own county.

The industry has grown remarkably. The six hundred women at present doing hand-made lace in Travancore live mainly in fifty-six villages round the town of Nagercoil and are supervised by the women’s staff of the London Mission. The women work at home, often outside their cottage doors, sitting on low stools with the lace bobbins spread over their laps. They are visited regularly so that the pattern can be examined and to give a chance to new women in the village to start on learners’ piece of lace. Most of the women are quick at picking up a new pattern or in carrying out a special order to suit a dress, but there are a large number of older women who find it difficult to do anything else than straightforward yard lace, for which there is not a great sale at present. The women and homes dependent on yard lace have been badly hit. But for the individual lace worker there is still plenty of work. One woman missionary who cuts garments on which lace insertions are to be made estimates that every half-hour’s work on her part means a whole month’s lace-making for a woman.