More than 4,300 hours of work: Meet the Carrickmacross lacemakers behind Ireland’s most exquisite dress

Visitors to Collins Barracks in Dublin next week will be able to marvel at the most ethereal and exquisite dress in Carrickmacross lace, the most monumental ever crafted in Ireland. It made the showstopping finale to Clare fashion designer Michael Stewart’s Standing Ground haute couture debut at the Irish Embassy in Paris in July, worn by the American model Kristen McMenamy. It was Stewart’s way of honouring one of the finest laces in the world, and a great Irish heritage skill. It also celebrated the painstaking handwork of the lacemakers who brought the gown to completion in their own homes in Co Monaghan over the course of six months. “It was also showing how new and innovative [the lace] can be,” says Stewart.This comes during a revival of machine-made lace in fashion, with variations from the catwalk to the high street, from Chanel and Chloe to Cos and M&S. This echoes a previous renaissance in 2011 when lace migrated from the boudoir into high fashion. Its religious associations have long been abandoned for everyday dressing, but nevertheless, handmade lace still traditionally marks special occasions such as weddings, Communions or christenings. The Carrickmacross gown took more than 4,300 hours to make and, when finished, the circumference of its hemline (that didn’t include the godet or train) was 13m. “I knew it was going to be special,” says Teresa Kelly, one of the main lacemakers involved, “because it had never been done before, so it was of historical importance”. With its elegant silhouette and Stewart’s hand drawn original motifs of brambles, dragonflies and blackberries, inspired by his native Burren landscape, the dress was also modern, fresh and desirable.READ MORETheresa Kelly at home in Carrickmacross. Photograph: Alan Betson/The Irish Times Theresa Kelly's work. Photograph: Alan Betson/The Irish Times Natalie B Coleman, an award-winning fashion designer and educator from Carrickmacross who has long championed the craft, was central to the project. At London Fashion Week in 2019, her Sisters collection, in collaboration with the UN, featured a dreamy white wedding dress embellished with blood-red embroidery and sleeves in Carrickmacross lace, a follow-up to another collection shown in New York the previous year. She met Stewart when she was guest lecturing in Limerick School of Art and Design where he studied. His first introduction to Carrickmacross lace was when she showed him her wedding dress made by lacemaker Martha Hughes. Stewart recalls the impact it had on him at the time and the sense of “captured energy” from the hands that made it. When he decided to design the dress, he needed Coleman’s blessing, and they worked together on the project for a year before it was brought to the lacemakers. “It could not have happened without her,” he says.Natalie B Coleman in her studio in Carrickmacross. Photograph: Alan Betson/The Irish Times The lace starts with a paper pattern covered with net and a layer of organdie on top of that. The craft in Ireland is said to have originated in Monaghan in about 1820, when a local rector’s wife brought back samples of Italian lace. After the Famine, local lace schools were set up to provide an income for impoverished rural families, a cottage industry that became widespread, employing hundreds of women and later sustained by the St Louis nuns when they opened their own lace school in Carrickmacross in 1888. So it was made by the poor for the rich.When St Louis closed in 1988, the co-operative (formed in 1984) took over the craft and established the Carrickmacross Lace Gallery, now a focal point in the town, with displays of current and vintage laces from wedding veils and communion dresses to ecclesiastical vestments and christening gowns. Our recent visit to the gallery preceded a meeting with some of the women who worked on the Stewart gown.The Carrickmacross Lace Gallery, a shop, museum and workshop in Market Square, Carrickmacross. Photograph: Alan Betson/The Irish Times Ann McMahon was 14 when she started making lace with the nuns, “and I stayed with them until they closed”, she says, sitting beside the window of her home outside the town. “I would get 50p for a little doily that would take three hours to make,” she says. “It was an income that was needed as women didn’t go out to work then.”A skilled craftswoman, she works at her lacemaking every day from 10am until 10pm in her armchair. “I am so used to having something in my hands. The only day I don’t sew is on Christmas Day,” she says. Her output has been prodigious. She was commissioned to make a welcoming lace gift for Michelle Obama with shamrocks and hearts, has made navy lace for Sybil Connolly, many christening robes, dozens of mantillas for funerals, a 12ft-long veil for a bride in Tipperary last year and many others. “I love to see the finished product and the bride coming down the aisle,” she says.She also teaches at the Lace Gallery. “You have to teach them how to hold it first,” she says, grasping a piece of lace, “and first you have to get rid of those red nails, so in the second week there are no nails and they are hooked after the second class.” Ann McMahon at her home in Carrickmacross. Photograph: Alan Betson/The Irish Times “Carrickmacross lace has survived by people wanting to keep it alive,” she believes. Her students have included two men – French men studying fashion design – “but the best so far was Michael Stewart as [the work for him] involved so many elements”.That’s a view endorsed by another lacemaker who worked on the Stewart gown, Bríd Deery. “I didn’t think the dress would be so amazing. Michael listened to us. He really listened to us and then did the designs which were beautiful.” From Carrickmacross and reared in a house with needles, she started lacemaking 15 years ago. Bríd Deery at her home in Carrickmacross. Photograph: Alan Betson/The Irish Times “What started as a hobby became an obsession. Working on the dress consumed my life – and I was also minding grandchildren at the time, coming home cooking dinner and then working on it. We didn’t know how much work it would be, but we did it in six months.” Another wonderful piece she made for her daughter-in-law is a long cathedral-length lace veil studded with crystal that took a year to complete. “If you were only to do this for the money, there would be no enjoyment. You have to love it. I fell for it straight away.”For Teresa Kelly, lacemaking is very logical and precise but also creative. “I love the boundaries that lace sets, but within those boundaries you can explore different ideas, so all the time you are pushing boundaries, you are finding self-expression.” She is from Mullingar, Co Westmeath. She studied art in Sligo principally to teach creative embroidery in NCAD. She knew nothing about Carrickmacross lace until she came to the town 40 years ago and learned lacemaking at night classes from “an amazing teacher”, Catherine Flanagan. She went on to win a gold medal at the RDS, the first of many accolades for her artistry both in Ireland and abroad. In her home, evidence of this more abstract work abounds, so giving six to eight months of her life “to create somebody else’s vision” was an exceptional task, but she gets itchy fingers if she’s not making lace. “I am that person who just likes their hands to be busy,” she says. “Keeps me pure! It is very meditative, and I am always thinking about what I am going to do next.” Carrickmacross lace has survived because “it is relatively fast and was always commercial”, she says. “Other needlepoint lace took forever to make.” She makes shawls rather than veils so they can be worn again. “If you have lace, you have to flaunt it.” Of all of those involved, Martha Hughes’s outstanding talents have earned her innumerable awards. Having mastered the craft over 40 years ago when she came to live in Carrickmacross from Co Mayo, she has been a national prize-winner nine times since 1988. In a quiet corner of her livingroom, she sits in a well-lit armchair where she plies her work, explaining its little loops, filling stitches, the single thorns, the double thorns and the pop (small buttonhole stitch circles) and little stars signature details of the craft. Sybil Connolly, for whom she made a panel for a black dress for New York in 1994, described her work as surgically precise. Martha Hughes in Carrickmacross. Photograph: Alan Betson/The Irish Times Martha Hughes with some of her work “I have always been fastidious and I am my own biggest critic,” she says with a smile. “I would not give anything to anyone if it did not please my eye first. A good piece of lace is the same back or front,” she says proudly as she displays an extraordinarily beautiful evening blouse made 12 years ago, and another on black net that she intends to wear to the Collins Barracks opening.She has had cancer twice. “Lacemaking helps me concentrate and focus on my life again both spiritually and emotionally. It is very therapeutic and very consoling because you must concentrate. I can look at old designs and take from them.” She has a valuable collection of antique patterns wrapped in parchment and greaseproof paper with hand drawings of motifs, of which some designs from old mantillas were used by Connolly. Patterns such as the harp and shamrock are 70-80 years old, while others for priests’ vestments she reckons go back a century.Stewart’s dress was enjoyable but hard, and they all worked collectively for the first time to finish it. “We had six months to do it and it was very detailed. The last bit took Teresa and I from 9.30 in the morning right through the night until 5.30 in the morning – the rest of the lacemakers left at 3 in the morning – but we finally completed it. I ironed it on that table over there and it went off to London with Natalie in a plain little plastic bag.”Stewart says the dress is about the different hands that made it, but the design is new, with a different feeling, using the traditional elements of the craft. The seams are put together by the lacemaking technique of overlapping, “so it is very innovative in terms of its construction as well”, he says. “It was my hands, their hands, the hands of my team and so it became something of its own.”The display of the Carrickmacross lace dress, which also includes the draped and beaded dress that won Stewart the LVMH Savoir Faire prize in 2024, opens on November 10th in Collins Barricks and runs for eight weeks