Design Notes on Lace-Inspired Pearls in the Seed Collection

We rarely know in advance where a material will lead us, but what we found when we began digging through archives of historic lace, knotting, and crochet was the same language, repeated across different hands, centuries, and contexts. Together they illustrate what we make out of necessity, what we come to value, and what knowledge we work hardest to preserve. It's bigger than technique; it's our shared humanity.

The Seed collection carries that feeling into seed pearls, investigating how we can interpret the same qualities of softness and intricacy into something that was already precious and singular by nature.

The second is knotted cord, where archaeologists found impressions of cords and nets pressed into clay, dating back roughly 25,000 years.

Braiding and knotting are close relatives, both turning a single strand into structure by hand.  For most of history they served practical uses: catching fish, carrying food, building shelter. The string bag alone shows up across cultures, from bilum bags in Papua New Guinea to dilly bags carried across Australia to netted bags found in southwestern Texas. Different continents, different centuries, arriving at the same answer.

In 1809, a machine maker named John Heathcoat built a lace machine by studying the exact hand movements of a working lacemaker, then engineering a mechanism to replicate them. Within decades, machines could copy nearly every kind of lace ever made by hand.

By 1900, the handmade lace industry had all but disappeared as a commercial trade, but it didn't happen without a fight: in England, skilled workers responded by smashing and destroying the machines themselves.

Despite industrialization, the knowledge of the craft moved forward through printed pattern booklets instead, passed hand to hand: instruction detailed enough to preserve the intricacy of the technique, and precise enough to keep the craft alive at a community level.