Early machine laces were made to replicate hand-made lace as closely as the technology of the day would permit, but gradually machine lace became a commodity in its own right. It is always desirable to be able to tell the difference, though usually it is the older pieces that are more difficult to tell apart.
Knowing how to work the basic techniques of the hand-made version always goes a long way to recognising a machine made copy, for instance hand worked half stich in bobbin lace (nearly always) has horizontal and diagonal threads whereas a lot of machine lace has vertical and diagonal threads. Very often it is necessary to look at a piece of lace through a magnifying lens (x8 or x10) to see how the threads are interlinked.
Click on any of the links below to see some examples of the various types of machine made lace, and examples of the hand-made lace which they tried to imitate.
The earliest knitting machine was the stocking frame invented by Rev William Lee in 1588, but for a long time was used only for the knitting of hosiery but by the mid 18th century they could make eylet holes, and gradually developed into the domestic knitting machines of today and their industrial equivalents.
These machines work with a single thread/yarn which moves back and forth across the knitting with loops of thread pulled through loops of thread in the same way that it does with hand knitting.
There is no hand worked equivalent of warp knitting. There is a bed of hooks as with a weft knitting machine but a separate thread for each hook and these threads swap places with each other as the fabric grows so as to connect together. The nearest hand equivalent would be to imagine lots of pices of hand crochet arranged next to each other so that the hook could pull the thread of the adjacent piece through its loop instead of its own thread.
The latest generation of warp knitting machines are the Raschel machines which can produce huge quantities of lace which is recognisable by the rows of chain stitches on the reverse.
The Hand Machine had a row double pointed needles with centre eye and rows of pincers either end to grip and release the needles as necessary. It used relatively short lengths of thread. One needle was the master needle which controlled the movements of all the others by means of a pantograph. The machine operative guided the master needle so that it passed in and out of the fabric to make a wide variety of stitches, including oversewn eyelet holes and a buttonholed edge but it was not accurate enough to copy real needlelace, nor could it make knots.
The Schiffli embroidery machines use two spools of thread to make lock stitches - the same as a domestic sewing machine - but again with lots of needles working in unison for mass production. It is used extensively to make embroidered nets which from a distance can be mistaken for hand-run darned net, and also on acetate fabric which can be dissolved away to leave 'chemical lace'.
Chain stitch machines such as the Cornely and Bonnaz use a single thread for each needle and reproduce the chain stitches of hand tambouring and are used for embroidering net and fine fabrics.
The earliest of these, the Bobinnet was invented by John Heathcoat in 1808 and exactly copied the thread movements of point ground net, but in wider widths than normally managed on a pillow. The next generation of twist net machines, the Pusher machines were able to produce a variety of stitch patterns, but not picots and any outlining gimps had to be added by hand. After that came the huge Leavers machines which could make passable copies of a wide variety of laces. Lace Curtain machines work on similar principals but the lace is characterised by strong vertical pillaring (which is not chained).
Barmen machines are small circular machines developed from braiding machines. They produce a variety of narrow, torchon-like laces.