On Tue, 18 Apr 2006, Marie Stewart wrote: > There are two main ways to make lace... start with cloth and put > holes into it to form the lace (punti tagliati, hedebo work, cut work, > embroidered lace) and the other way is to form lace from string by > forming a repetitive pattern that becomes the body of the work (bobbin > lace, tatting, knitted, knotwork) > > All can create lace... cloth with a pattern of holes in it. Woven > techniques are <i>perhaps</i> the oldest. So can you give a little > more information of what you are looking for... I'll dig through the > library.
No library digging needed for this one, I think; I suspect you can give me enough for my purposes off the top of your head! Here's the situation: I'm editing an article that refers to depictions of the Virgin in 14th and 15th century European paintings as showing clothes decorated with such rich ornamentations as "ermine, jewels, and pure gold lace." I'm quite familiar with the paintings of this period, and I've never seen anything in them that could reliably be called "gold lace," so I suspect that the author (not being a costume person) is misapplying a modern term to another type of decoration. She probably just means trim borders or embroidery, but I can't put words into her mouth. In asking her exactly what it is she's trying to call attention to, I need to explain that the wording she's used won't work, because lace (as readers would interpret the term) wasn't used yet. I'd like to be on firm ground when I say that, and it would help if I could say that "what is commonly thought of as lace trim on clothing doesn't appear until X period; I suspect you're describing something else." So, I don't need a specific date for the technique, just a ballpark half-century or quarter-century in which something visibly recognizable as "lace" became commonly used as clothing decoration. I know I see recognizable lace all over Elizabethan art, and I don't see it in 14th century art. But I don't have a sense for when exactly it starts cropping up as a typical feature in depictions of clothing. --Robin _______________________________________________ h-costume mailing list [email protected] http://mail.indra.com/mailman/listinfo/h-costume
