Doilies: Love 'em or Hate 'em

I'm not really a "frilly" sort of person, so I suppose that it's silly that I spend every free moment making lots and lots of lovely laces that I rarely use. I have made a lot of tatted doilies, but most of them I have given away to various deserving people. I am fortunate to come from a very loving family who appreciate all of the hand made articles I have given them. I DO make extra effort to create things worthy of appreciation and I believe that most of what I make fits into the art rather than craft category. Although I know that in the hands of a skilled person pasta stuck on a styrofoam base and spray painted in gold, could be very artistic, my hands are not that skilled. So I stay with the fibre arts where I know what I bring to the table is a modicum of skill and a large dose of patience which usually produces artful results.

I have seen recently an abundance of comments about doilies being old fashioned and out of keeping with today's modern decorating trends, which may very well be true. When you consider the Victorian era where decorative flair enjoyed it's heyday, you also had an assortment of beautiful and irreplaceable wooden tables, desks, sideboards and hutches which were easily marked with water or the placement of heavy, rough objects on their shiny surfaces. It was much better to protect these delicate surfaces with ornate laces that to suffer scratches on a tabletop or water stains on a piano.

The men of that day liberally applied Macassar oil to their hair in the same way that people today would use mousse and hair gel. The oil often left stains on the woven fabric of upholstered chairs and sofas which, unlike our present furniture, was not easily cleaned. To avoid permanently stained fabric, lace pieces were created to fit over the back of the furniture. Additional lace pieces were created to protect upholstered arms from wear, so that you often see patterns for sets of anti-macassars. These lace pieces, although beautiful in their own right, were essentially rags (pretty "rags", but rags none the less) used to protect valuable pieces of delicate furniture.
Fast forward to today and take a look around your own living space. Most dinnerware is stored in a kitchen cupboard, not in a mahogany china cabinet, The tables are often covered by sheets of shatter proof glass negating the need for any other protection. The piano has been replaced by an entertainment centre made out of plastic which requires no protection from watermarks and scratches. Modern hair care products don't leave greasy splotches on upholstery and even the furniture itself is said to have a "life span"

So do doilies and the like serve a purpose in our modern environment? Most emphatically YES! Doilies give a splash of colour, an element of interest, and a feeling of hom-i-ness to a sterile environment. We don't use them with the same abandon of the Victorian era, but doilies still have a roll to play in decorating our homes. Since they are no longer just rags used to protect more valuable pieces, it is all the more important that the doilies we use be especially beautiful, and particularly well executed. An assortment of doilies lets you give a quick lift to the room just by changing the lace on display. You could hide them behind glass like the art they are, but how much better to lay them out on a table and change them with the seasons.

So which are you? Doily lover, or doily hater?