Old Puncetto needle lace book in English

Some years ago while searching in the World Catalogue, I came across a book published in 1917 by Theresa Rizzi. It was called: Poncetto Lace. I wrote to the curator of textiles at the Smithsonian Museum where the book was held and asked if it was possible to obtain a copy since the text was old enough to be out of copyright. The curator sent me some scans of the text and asked that I not circulate them as they were part of the Smithsonian's collection. She also said that the Museum had future plans to start publishing scans of the texts in their collection on the Internet Archive and at some future date this book would be there in the public domain.

I'm excited to tell you that it has now been added to the Internet Archive and you can download it yourself here.

This is the only dedicated manual for Puncetto needle lace written in English that I know of. Before you get too excited, this is a manual from 1917, so if you're familiar with old instruction manuals, you'll know that step-by step photos didn't exist due to the high cost of reproducing photography so instructions were written out and sometimes very difficult to follow. Theresa Rizzi has, however written this booklet with the intention of her readers being able to learn from her instructions so it is better than a lot of old manuals from the period. The only thing I found unclear was how to start a piece not attached to a piece of fabric. However, thankfully today there are other ways to learn this, one being an excellent video series on YouTube (start with Puncetto Anfang).

Poncetto Lace is only 16 pages long and has a few patterns for insertions and edgings. While it is not an exhaustive how-to manual, it may just help you to understand a bit more if you've been struggling with Italian instructions.