This may or may not be related but in research that someone recently put up on the web after her trip to England and allowed to handle primary source material she found that if the garments had precious metal in any form on them that the metal was removed.
Hope that helps. It may not have been linen but a precious metal thread and it may have been removed. Not sure how they could test for it though. Chiara On Wed, August 16, 2006 12:15 pm, Ailith Mackintosh said: > Greetings. > > I have received a request for help: > > "It seems that in a lot of extant garments, the protein fibers > (wool and silk) have survived, while the plant fibers have not. We > can only > speculate that linen thread was used because there are stitching > holes and > no thread (and it seems unlikely that they would have pulled the > silk or > wool sewing thread out before tossing the rest in the trash). I was > hoping > you might be able to help me find some sort of documentation that I > can use > as a reference that explains how this works? It doesn't have to be > overly > technical." > > Right now I cannot get to my books and my brain is not working...so > I'm > turning to the best group of costuming/clothing/historians that I > can think > of. Can any of you help, please? > > Thanks so much. > > kate > Outgoing email scanned by Norton AntiVirus > > > _______________________________________________ > h-costume mailing list > [email protected] > http://mail.indra.com/mailman/listinfo/h-costume > _______________________________________________ h-costume mailing list [email protected] http://mail.indra.com/mailman/listinfo/h-costume
