Victorian Gilt

For the past six months i have been travelling through Epsom on a bus every single day. The bus stops right outside a shop called Victorian Gilt,(<----Don't go to their website it uses comic sans) it looks like an op shop but you can tell it's expensive so I never went in there until yesterday.

THE LACE!!!! oh my fucking god was there some lace. every kind you can imagine in varying stages of decay, completion and skill. From handkerchiefs to table cloths, tatted collars, shirt cuffs, e.v.e.r.y.t.h.i.n.g. It was intense. The shop looks a little bit like my bedroom, masses of organised piles of amazingness, The lady who owns it knew exactly where to find everything which was amazing you can't even see the walls and only small sections of the floor.

Looking through the piles of lace it was a little overwhelming, hundreds of thousands of hours of work were right here in a jumbled pile in Epsom. $8 for a little irish lace doily that would have taken weeks to make with a skill and neatness that would have taken years to perfect. $8? It's not art is it? One lady in the store who was looking at a hand made lace tablecloth was shocked when told it was $250. If you were to pay someone what they were worth to make that i hate to think what it would cost. She probably then went to living and giving and bought a mass produced pile of synthetic prettiness that was oh so not contemporary. I wonder how much machine made lace can be produced in the time it takes to make a lace handkerchief? One particular one i saw was made for a wedding, the thread was finer than strands of my hair and I could barely see the stitches it it was so elaborate. Dizzying. I tried to think of this handkerchief while i was stitching with hair earlier today and the hair was breaking and catching on things and i was frowning and fuck fuck you-ing. Ladies don't swear. I have realised I have absolutely no patience.

I want to go back to the shop and ask her if I may photograph some of the laces because they are just tooooo beautiful for words. There is also an unfinished piece there which would have been huge, it had many different styles of lace within it and i would bet $8 that the woman who was making it was too blind or too dead to complete it. It was great to see the process involved, the outine, the backing on the lace, the drawn pattern template. awestruck