All around the world, countless napperon, doilies, dentelle and lace textile pieces are gathering dust in grandmothers’ homes, forgotten in storages, or dumped in clothing donation containers. Today, there’s something unworthy or useless about these little textile pieces. I will never forget when Anne, a buyer of antique lace in Bruges—the epicentre of lacework in Belgium—told me: “There’s no money that can pay for this work! That’s why I don’t pay lace weavers for new work, I only buy second-hand pieces. There’s no market for ethically paying this labour today.”
By Teresa Carvalheira
It is clear that this particular making tradition is endangered and that the function and value of lace as decorative or luxury pieces are currently being challenged. However, these intramundane objects also carry the responsibility of family memory and are often still being passed on to younger generations. It makes me wonder: are heirlooms still relevant intergenerational transfers in a future-oriented era that champions progress and suffers from neophilia, an infatuation with everything new?
As paradigm shifts, there’s a growing global claim on heritage and its preservation, which is highly visible on institutional levels. But in all its complexities, whose heritage are we talking about when we refer to ancestral knowledge? And who is meant to preserve it? Maybe far from systemic thinking, I’ve recently narrowed my contribution to zooming into family-sized structures. In the practice of making heirlooms, I seek to recreate functional objects that can bring forward the invisibilities of how home textiles were made, who made them, who wore them and how; to foster future thinking on a domestic scale.
“It makes me wonder: are heirlooms still relevant intergenerational transfers in a future-oriented era that champions progress and suffers from neophilia, an infatuation with everything new?”
My practice begins with an interest in napping customs and traditions. Growing up in the South of Portugal, the practice of napping was something that I inherited but have never understood well. The nap, sesta in Portuguese, is commonly perceived as a pause at midday and a natural response to the heat of summer, something you do directly following food ingestion. A tradition that notions of progress have first rendered private and domestic and later taboo and obsolete.
On a not-so-different note, napperons are small, domestic textile pieces with a mostly decorative function. However different, napping and napperons meet possibly amidst soft textures and a tender sense of belonging. Difficult to find consensus in its definition, napperons can either be handmade or industrial textile pieces, made out of either natural or synthetic materials and with diverse techniques ranging from lacework to crochet and embroidery. These net-like pieces are often deemed old-fashioned and have therefore increasing obsolescence. Nonetheless, they encapsulate not only textile history but a web of stories of domestic, feminine and family craft labour.
There are curious synchronicities to be found in the language, too. Adding to the French “nappe” for textile surfaces, “napping” in English also refers to a type of textile finishing, especially that of blankets. This technique is more commonly known as carding, where the fibres are pulled out, to create a softer and more comfortable surface. I understand that both napping as a practice of rest and the making of the napperons encapsulate time in a similar way and might not seem very useful or productive in today’s fast-paced society.
In this context of tradition and family structures, I became fascinated by the idea of material inheritance, and how we might preserve or revive them using the tools of design, art and craft. How do we value the things that we inherit from others? What do we keep and why, and how might we regenerate these things into continuity?
Credits: Teresa Carvalheira x Eunice Pais | Photography: PAIS.Agency | Models: Julija Česnulaitytė & Monja Simon
Common threads
As someone who is interested in textile crafts, I began by looking into the past: taking stock of the kinds of artefacts that are known for being intimate, familiar, and (economically) unproductive — the manual (hand-stitched), time-consuming and multi-technique, which are characterised by errors (human hand) and uneven materials.
I became interested in napperons specifically when I started receiving them from friends. Following in the footsteps of the historical figure of the ragpicker, who collects unwanted textiles and transforms them into new pieces, I sought to take on the role of translator. A tailor of material heritage situated between a ragpicker and a keeper of family history. Perhaps I am a nappicker. And for the nappicker, heirlooming is a process of transmission and translation, while transforming family-inherited napperons into memorial, yet functional, homeware or wearable objects. These new rags, the napperons, now tell a different story: through a process of textile and story patchwork, memories and future narratives are stitched together.
“Following in the footsteps of the historical figure of the ragpicker, who collects unwanted textiles and transforms them into new pieces, I sought to take on the role of translator. A tailor of material heritage situated between a ragpicker and a keeper of family history. ”
How to look within to look forward
In 2022 I handled the whole collection of the late grandmother of my friend Romeu. Jacinta was her name. In the same year, Romeu lost Jacinta and later his mother, making him the sole heir and keeper of his family artefacts and archives.
Over 60 pieces of napperons, of different techniques, materials, states of conservation, plus materials (yarns and tools) were passed to me by Romeu. I am interested in having temporary custody of particularly delicate objects charged with family storytelling and reworking through a process of cooperation and intimate dialogue. It became quickly apparent, from our early conversations about these artefacts, that these are objects of personal transmission. Most of the time Romeu had no reference for these objects, not knowing what they were or where they were used — did Jacinta make them herself; did she cherish them in particular? But a closer look at each of them allowed fragments of memories and stories to resurface. Through these small textile objects, Romeu had the chance to revisit forgotten moments from his early childhood: memories of his grandmother Jacinta, the favourite dish that she used to cook for him, her favourite topics of conversation; and through simple stains of coffee and cigarette butts, to revisit her habits and her pain. This process surprisingly became a facilitator of Romeu’s grieving process.
Patchwork as co-design
Eventually I came to realise that the textile language is an intimate one, closer to poetry, thus challenging to decipher. Its storytelling is private and highly dependent on context and familiarity. In fashion it is not unusual that creative leadership is stretched or shared and I recall that recently, the demi-couture house WED coined their bespoke service approach for co-designing garments as Client Creative Collaboration. In a way, this acknowledgement of the importance of the guidance of the end-user, or the wearer, honours the ancestry of crafts and dressmaking. In rethinking my practice of textile customisation, I too wanted to be more of a facilitator and let the heir and the heirloom speak their stories and create their new shape.
For Romeu, I patchworked his inherited pieces all together into a quilt blanket, for the new home he is building, following the stories I gratefully had access to. Patchworking these pieces is an archival and curatorial practice to keep alive memories of ancestry. There’s no order; there’s no beginning or end. The needle drafts the memories into the napperon pieces and the yarn is the thread that connects the storyline in an organic way that becomes difficult to describe in Design terms. Each piece is a tool of exchange, of knowledge and memories, and through them, I can establish a connection with a different generation, while simultaneously stepping out of the design realm, touching upon perhaps artistic and spiritual practices.
Credits: Teresa Carvalheira x Eunice Pais | Photography: PAIS.Agency | Models: Julija Česnulaitytė & Monja Simon
This work can only be understood in the intimacy of the process by communicating the time, and the gestures; by looking closely, in detail to what there was and what could be. It’s a constant addition process, but one where mathematics is not entirely useful. Its sum results in an emotional equation rather than a numeric one. It does not need to speak to others, so the artefacts are not made considering public dissemination. The process stops when the conversation between us stops and the heir is satisfied. Family threads are unfinished, so a new conversation starts. One solely between the heir and the objects, or perhaps their ancestors, knowing the addition of threads can always continue as long as memory is honoured.
Jacinta also offered me yarns and tools from her early years of education. Fibre arts and manual needlework were historically performed and transmitted in domestic spaces or girls-only schools and orphanages. As Jacinta once studied them, her work and legacy are now transmitted into a new web. I now apply the tools and materials left from Romeu’s patchwork in other pieces, along with my own inherited tools and materials, so that in a way, through me, these stories contaminate other stories. Thus, our ancestors continue to exist.
Throughout these explorations, I learned to understand heirlooming as a one-on-one service-based practice that allows for intergenerational and interdisciplinary connections. Working on bespoke pieces directly with the ones who inherited them results in unique, intimate and slow-paced processes made possible through frequent conversation and manual needlework. That is, in resistance to automation, and as perhaps the only plausible reaction to a fast-paced society already in permacrisis.
All images courtesy Teresa Carvailhera.
About the author
Teresa Carvalheira is a designer-researcher, up-cycler and community manager for Fashion Revolution Portugal. With an academic background in fashion design, tailoring and social design, she continues to work on interdisciplinary projects relating to crafts, environment and migration between The Netherlands, Portugal and Turkey.
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