For something so beautiful and delicate as lace, some of the stitches synonomous with Irish lace have very robust names. Roach, pheasant's eye, herringbone, cobweb. What does roach, for instance, put you in mind of? A horrid scuttling cockroach? The thing is, you'd be right.
Carrickmacross lace-maker Theresa Kelly is explaining the origin of these names. "Carrickmacross lace - like all lace-making - started out as a cottage industry. Women invented their own stitches, and named them after things they saw around them." Suddenly, it makes sense, this little piece of social history.
Kelly has been making Carrickmacross lace for some 15 years. "We moved to Castleblayney 15 years ago, and I went to a nightclass in lace-making there. We were taught by Kathleen Flanagan, who'd been making lace since she was seven. There were about 15 of us in the class, but most of the women had been coming for years. It was a social occasion for them. It meant that there would only be two or three people coming in new to it every year, so they got a lot of attention."
After two years, the family then moved to Carrickmacross, by which stage Kelly was completely entranced by lace-making. "You have to really love it," she stresses, "because of the amount of work in it." She's sitting in the living room of her house in Carrickmacross, surrounded by work both framed and unframed for her forthcoming exhibition.
On the table is a small pile of leaves and ivy, made of lace. She picks up a tiny scrap, about the size of a thumbnail, which is going to be part of something bigger. "An hour's work," she says cheerfully.
There is two years' work in this current exhibition, and I would hate to calculate how many hours went into such close and tiny work. It's such a different concept to that of the painter, who also spends two years preparing for an exhibition. Lacemaking is so precise and painstaking, with no leeway for mistakes of the kind that painters can rectify by painting over.
Kelly has been experimenting with patterns and forms for some time. In her hallway is a prize-winning piece of ferns and three-dimensional foxgloves. She is not interested in making anything for the tourist market, - "swans, harps, shamrocks". Her current exhibition comprises 25 pieces, all of which are framed. Some are mounted on slate and some on felt and silk fibres.
There is a mixture of flower pictures, representations of bog cotton, and abstract work, the last of which comes up clear and complex as snowflakes on the slate. She works only in white cotton on white net. One of the more unusual pieces is a spiral on slate, with Newgrange patterns beneath it. Lace and stone might not seem like obvious partners, but it works every time.
Although Kelly makes the odd christening robe, she rarely makes big pieces now. "It would take a couple of months, and very few people want to pay that sort of money. And I would get bored! I like creating my own ideas." She does, however, show me a long shawl which was one of her early pieces, and one of the very few she has kept.
It is a veritable garden of wildflowers and butterflies, showcasing dozens of different intricate types of stitches, edged with scallops and loops. It is exquisitely, stunningly beautiful, and looks as if it should be in a museum. Lucky friends borrow it for weddings, and it will be passed to her daughter in time.
The signature stitches of Carrickmacross lace are loops and pops. The lace is edged with tiny loops, and pops are tiny circles with a hole in the middle - like Polo mints. Lace-makers are always looking for new patterns, which are closely guarded by their owners. They're like musicians, always looking for unusual tunes. And they are exclusively women. "Although in Clones after the second World War, some men who had been shell-shocked learned to make lace for a living."
One of the reasons that women guarded their patterns is that their unique pattern was their living. The lace schools were set up during the Famine, and a large piece for a wedding dress or veil would buy a passage to America. "Women never kept any of the lace for themselves. They couldn't afford to. But it meant that some women were independent, and Ireland is one of the few countries that single women emigrated from - because they could afford to pay their own passage."
So even if you had ancestors who made lace, it's unlikely any of it would have passed down to you. The pieces which survive in museums tend to be secular - collars, dress panels, wedding veils. "The best lace was always buried with the bishops," Kelly says. "They were laid out in it." She can't help sounding scandalised at the disappearance forever of all that beautiful hard-won work.
Theresa Kelly's lace exhibition will be at the Talbot 101 restaurant from May 21st to June 9th. She can be contacted at theresakellylace@eircom.net