The Met has a strip of lace from about 1600. It’s two inches deep and eighty inches long, a little over two metres, and the record calls it a border. That’s almost all the record says. There’s no place of making, no maker, no description. There are three photographs.

The first two show the same stretch of it, pinned to a dark blue silk mount. What you see is a straight edge along the top and, hanging from it, a row of pointed shapes like the teeth of a very fancy saw. Each point is a frame of thick white bars, and inside the frame is a stalk with a bud on it, a pair of leaves curling away at the top, and a few loops underneath, like a ribbon tied in a bow. Some of the bars have a dotted line running down the middle. The outer edges are covered in picots, small knotted loops that stand out from the edge.

It’s needle lace, and the kind made around 1600 is often called punto in aria, “stitches in the air.” Earlier needlework of this sort was cut into linen: you pulled threads out of a woven cloth and embroidered over the grid that was left. Punto in aria doesn’t start from cloth at all. As the sources I could reach describe it, the pattern is drawn on parchment, and the parchment is sewn to a couple of layers of fabric to stiffen it. A thread is laid along the lines of the drawing and tacked down through all the layers. Then the lace is built over that outline, almost entirely in buttonhole stitches, one looped into the next. Nothing is stitched into the parchment itself. When it’s done, the tacking threads are cut, the parchment and fabric fall away, and what’s left is held together by nothing but its own stitches. That’s why it’s counted as one of the first true laces: there’s no cloth anywhere in it.

So every bar in this border is a long row of buttonhole stitches, and every picot is a stitch that was knotted and pulled out on purpose. In the photograph, the points come about one and three-quarter inches apart. If that spacing holds over the whole eighty inches, which I can’t check, there are about forty-five of them.

What I spent longest on was comparing them. They’re all the same design, but they’re not the same. In the first photograph, the left-hand point is broader than its neighbours, and its tip hangs lower. Above each bud the stalk curls over into a hook, a bit like a bird’s head. In the fourth and fifth the hook is tight and clear, and in the third it hardly curls at all. The loops at the bottom of each point are a slightly different size every time. None of these is a mistake you’d notice from across a room, and probably none of them was meant. I don’t know whether the parchment pattern was drawn out once for the whole length or drawn for a short section and moved along, so I can’t say how much of the difference is in the drawing and how much is in the hand. Either way, someone made forty-odd copies of one idea, a loop at a time, and each copy came out a little bit itself.

The border came to the Met in 1909, in a single purchase of six or seven hundred pieces of lace from the Blackbornes, a father-and-son firm of lace dealers in London. The museum raised the money by subscription, which is what the credit line means. The pieces were numbered as a run, 09.68.1 to 09.68.689, and this one is 09.68.70.

The third photograph on the record is of something else. It’s a different strip, much plainer: a fine net ground with a wavy line running along it and little paired leaves between the waves, very regular. The label in the corner says 09.68.470. That piece has its own record, where it’s an insertion, nineteenth-century, made of bobbin lace rather than needle lace, and its own main photograph is this same picture. It’s also eighty inches long. Somewhere between the photograph and the catalogue, the 4 dropped out of the number, and a picture of one long strip of lace was filed under another long strip of lace that’s almost the same number.

I don’t think that tells us anything about the border. But I liked finding it there, on the record of a thing made by repeating one shape over and over and getting it a little bit different each time.