On Wed, 16 Aug 2006, Zuzana Kraemerova wrote: > But if you place holes even under the center front seam (that means > the holes are in place where there is no opening any more, did I get > that right?), then your method is surely easier. I actually never even > thought about placing the holes there. I never had the chance to go to > a museum where I could see a dress with spiral lacing clearly in > detail. So that's why I didn't even think about it:-))
To my knowledge, there are no existing dresses from my period (14th-15th c.) complete enough to tell us about the front lacing. We have some survivals of garment edges with lacing holes, but we don't know what kinds of garments they came from. We have some garments with intact lacing holes in other uses (e.g. a Herjolfsnes garment with a few holes at the neckline). But no center front openings that show how the lacing holes related to the end of the opening. There are a number of useful sculptures, brasses, and paintings that show spiral lacing down the center front, but when the dress is depicted as laced-up, you can't see where the holes go in relation to the edge or the bottom seam. For practical purposes, though, on a full-length fitted dress, you can start that opening a little higher or lower if you want to put it in a particular relationship to the eyelets. Even if you've already sewn the lower front part together, if you're hand-sewing, it's a trivial matter to add or remove a few stitches after you've marked your eyelets or even after you've sewn them. If you're machine-sewing, you might have to make that adjustment by hand -- but of course the medieval seamstress wouldn't have had that consideration, and the style developed using medieval techniques as parameters, not modern ones. One of the nice things about spiral lacing is that it enables the sides to overlap, as the lace does not pass between the two garment edges; it "wraps" around them, turning them into a solid column. If that column includes the outer layer, the lining, and the seam allowances for both turned to the inside, and all that on each of two edges that overlap into a single stack, that makes a narrow line of eight layers of fabric wrapped around with a lace -- almost as strong as boning, but flexible, and it resists gapping. To encourage that overlap, I sew the center front seam with the overlap already in place, so that there isn't a pucker at the bottom of the laced area. And if the overlap is built into the bottom of the opening, it's very easy to continue the holes slightly past the point at which the opening is sewn shut. The point at which it changes from sewn-closed to laced-closed is invisible. > Now when thinking about it, I don't only make medieval dresses, I > make corsets and other garments of later periods where I use spiral > lacing. And there it's sometimes important to have the first and last > hole in the right place, so that's maybe why I'm making it all so > difficult:-) On a corset, bodice, or anything else where the lacing has to end at the end of the garment or at a waist seam, you definitely need to have the last hole at a certain place. I'd daresay, though, that for earlier garments, the holes may end up being a bit uneven in distance to accomplish that, reflecting a laxity in measuring. By the 18th or 19th century, I'd not be surprised to see them more precisely measured. And for the decorative sorts of lacings -- say, on a German or Italian Renaissance bodice, particularly the ones where a carefully arranged open front lacing is a design element -- I'd also expect the measurements to be more precise. --Robin _______________________________________________ h-costume mailing list [email protected] http://mail.indra.com/mailman/listinfo/h-costume
