I made a linen apron last week and trimmed it with a remnant of the simple lace that I had used on my coif and neckerchief. Wearing them together on Sunday, I noticed that the lace on the apron was ecru but that on the older garments had faded to white with repeated washing. I've never bothered about not washing with modern detergents on the grounds that, as Chris says, people in "my" period would have wanted their linen as white as possible.
Kate Bunting Librarian and 17th century reenactor >>> [EMAIL PROTECTED] 17/09/2005 19:52 >>> wrote: My educated guess on how white the lace should be is: as white as you can get it without modern "brighteners" -- the compounds added to modern detergents that reflect ultraviolet light and thus make whites look whiter. I believe that the fashion for "ecru" colored lace (ivory or tan) is a Victorian thing, intended to create an impression of age. There seems to be lots of evidence of Renaissance people expending a good deal of effort to make white linens actually as white as possible with the technology they had. -- ____________________________________________________________ O Chris Laning <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> - Davis, California + http://paternoster-row.org - http://paternosters.blogspot.com ____________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________ h-costume mailing list [email protected] http://mail.indra.com/mailman/listinfo/h-costume ______________________________________________________________________ This email has been scanned by the MessageLabs Email Security System. For more information please visit http://www.messagelabs.com/email ______________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________ h-costume mailing list [email protected] http://mail.indra.com/mailman/listinfo/h-costume
