The Island of Lace: Drawn Threadwork on Saba in the Dutch Caribbean
University Press of Mississippi, 2019
Nicknamed the “Island of Lace,” the Caribbean island of Saba is the smallest special municipality in the Netherlands. Folklorist Eric A. Eliason, at the behest of the president of the Saba Lace Ladies’ Foundation and Saba’s director of tourism, traveled to the island with the intent to document the history and patterns of Saba lace. Born out of his research, The Island of Lace tells the story of lacework’s central role in Saba’s culture, economy, and history. Accompanied by over three hundred of Scott Squire’s intimate photographs of lace workers and their extraordinary island society, this volume brings together in one place an as-complete-as-possible catalog of the rich designs worked by Saban women.
For 130 years, the practice of drawn threadwork―also known as Spanish work, fancy work, lacework, or Saba lace―has shaped the lives of Saban women. And yet, as the younger generation moves away from the island, it still survives. Sabans use drawn threadwork to symbolize the uniqueness of their island and express the ingenuity, diligence, bold inventiveness, pride in workmanship, love of beauty, and respect for tradition that define the Saban spirit.
Along with recording and honoring the creative legacy of generations of Saban women, this book serves as a guide to folk-art lace patterns from Saba so that practitioners can reference and perhaps re-create this work. The Island of Lace is the most comprehensive volume on this singular tradition ever published.
Review by Brian Roberts at Faculty Book Lunch
Eric Eliason’s book The Island of Lace: Drawn Threadwork on Saba in the Dutch Caribbean (University of Mississippi Press, 2019) details a tradition of threadwork on the Caribbean island of Saba. The island is a Dutch municipality adjacent to the US Virgin Islands, and hence Dr. Eliason’s book details an artistic tradition that is, literally, at the little-publicized border between the United States and the Netherlands. The book has three sections. The first tells the story of the arrival and development of lacework in Saba. In the late 19th century a girl from the island was sent by her parents to Caracas or some say Curaçao to live with nuns. They taught her to make lace, and she eventually taught others on Saba, so that lace production became the island’s 20th-century economic mainstay. Ambitiously, the book’s second section uses photography (by Scott Squire) to provide photographs of “every available pattern type and variation” of Saba lace. Among the hundreds of patterns, we see names like “Two Rows Dice” and “Old Time Star.” In a final section, which offers a series of profiles of lace workers, we learn about generations who have given lace to the Dutch royal family, of the woman who created a lace sampler regarded as the most significant piece on the island, of a town called Hell’s Gate whose residents have sought to avoid calling their local church building the Hell’s Gate Church.
The Island of Lace is a follow-up to Dr. Eliason’s 1997 book The Fruit of Her Hands, which offered an initial study of Saba lace and has since become a book on par with scripture among some Saba lace workers, with one artist saying, “It’s my good book. . . . It is my Bible.” Dr. Eliason’s earlier work was not just a study of lace but a means of perpetuating it as a Saban art form, a feat which in this new book he calls “perhaps the most satisfying result of my career.” No doubt The Island of Lace will also further the preservation and innovation of Saba lace styles, as Eric Eliason and Scott Squire have published this volume, with its painstaking detailing of Saba lace’s history and patterns, as a means of “inspir[ing] an upcoming generation to discover lace working.”