The Art of Brazilian Lace

by Laura Morelli

The lacemaker’s wrinkled hands are surprisingly agile. This seventy-something lady in

Prainha, on the northeastern coast of Brazil, rapidly maneuvers two dozen wooden

bobbins, which make a pleasant clicking sound as she works. Seeming to read my mind,

she smiles and says that her fingers have worked these bobbins since she was old

enough to follow her mother’s directions. Incongruously, her frenetic movements

produce a minuscule lace fragment. In fact, a full day’s work yields just a few inches of

delicate finery.

The extraordinarily laborious craft of bobbin lace (renda di bilros in Portuguese) came to

Brazil along with Portuguese colonists who claimed its beautiful northeastern coastline as

their own in the seventeenth century. Portugal already counted a rich tradition of

lacemaking, and colonists continued the practice in the New World. Mostly the province

of women, lacemaking was passed down from mothers to daughters, who learned by

watching and repeating their motions. While their European ancestors considered lace a

luxurious fashion accessory, in the New World, the craft seemed a natural extension of

more mundane trades that were already vital to the seaside culture: the making of

baskets, hats, hammocks, and fishing nets. Early colonists made lace to pass the time

and supplement their families’ income, making doilies, collars, and tablecloths out of

white and colored linen threads.

Lace can be produced either with a needle and thread (needle lace) or by interweaving

threads wound on bobbins. Bobbin lace is the predominant type of lace made on Brazil’s

northeastern coast. The technique begins with a pillow, almost always homemade, and

stuffed with cotton, grass, or even banana leaves. The pillow forms the workspace for

the rendeira, or lacemaker, who props it in her lap or places it on a special wooden

stand made for that purpose. She then covers the pillow with a lace template on paper

or cardboard. A collection of pins—commercial sewing notions or, in a pinch, cactus

thorns—holds the design in place on the pillow.

The lacemaker then uses bobbins or spindles, each wound with a single thread, to work

the pattern. Today most bobbins are made of wood, though in the past bone was also

used, which is why the technique is sometimes referred to as bone lace. As many as

50 bobbins, each holding an individual thread, might be used to work a single pattern.

Lacemakers complete the pattern by winding and overlapping the threads from the

bobbins to create a distinctive weave. Experienced lacemakers work at a rapid pace that, on the surface, seems effortless. Their wooden bobbins click together as they render

circles, stars, rosettes, and more complex motifs like scrolls, animals, leaves, and

flowers.

Today Brazil’s best lacemakers are concentrated on the country’s northeastern coast, in

the states of Ceará and Pará. Fortaleza, Ceará’s capital city, boasts many lace shops,

several outdoor markets, and a large craft center selling lace umbrellas, gloves, hats,

napkins, and tablecloths, as well as beautiful baby outfits and items befitting a bridal

trousseau. However, most of these shops are resellers for artisans working in coastal

villages. If you want to see lacemakers in action, take a day trip to the seaside towns of

Iguape or Prainha, both of which boast lacemaking centers where you can watch women

and girls making lace. Ask the lacemakers to indicate which patterns are most

traditional, as each town is known for its own patterns.

Several factors can influence the price of a lace piece, including the type of thread

used (cotton, silk, or other materials), the intricacy of the design, and the size, which

is a measure of the time it takes to complete it. As a general rule, you will pay less if

you buy directly from the lacemaker or one of the village markets rather than in a

Fortaleza lace shop, or if you buy a piece with lace accents, like a tablecloth with a lace

border. Any way you slice it, though, prices are downright cheap, considering the

laboriousness of this craft. You can pick up small items like napkins for around seven

to 15 Brazilian reals (just a few dollars). A full-size lace tablecloth or bedspread that

requires months of full-time labor will rarely run more than 800 Brazilian reals (around

$500). In Europe or the United States, you would pay many times the price for a

handmade item of equal quality.

In addition to getting a good deal on a fine piece of handmade lace, the main reward of

trekking to this remote part of Brazil is the chance to see this traditional trade in action.

Whether watching lacemakers at work in the market, at a lace center, or in the shade of

their own doorways, it’s a pleasure to witness the production of such delicate finery,

inch by inch.

The City Planners

by Margaret Atwood

Cruising these residential Sunday

streets in dry August sunlight:

what offends us is

the sanities:

5 the houses in pedantic1 rows, the planted

sanitary trees, assert

levelness of surface like a rebuke

to the dent in our car door.

No shouting here, or

10 shatter of glass; nothing more abrupt

than the rational whine of a power mower

cutting a straight swath in the discouraged grass.

But though the driveways neatly

sidestep hysteria

15 by being even, the roofs all display

the same slant of avoidance to the hot sky,

certain things:

the smell of spilled oil a faint

sickness lingering in the garages,

20 a splash of paint on brick surprising as a bruise,

a plastic hose poised in a vicious

coil; even the too-fixed stare of the wide windows

give momentary access to

the landscape behind or under

25 the future cracks in the plaster

when the houses, capsized, will slide

obliquely into the clay seas, gradual as glaciers

that right now nobody notices. That is where the City Planners

30 with the insane faces of political conspirators

are scattered over unsurveyed

territories, concealed from each other,

each in his own private blizzard;

guessing directions, they sketch

35 transitory lines rigid as wooden borders

on a wall in the white vanishing air

tracing the panic of suburb

order in a bland madness of snows.