Some of the silk brocades I use are taken from medieval patterns, and are woven to order, with a minimum of around three or four metres. They work out at around £90ish or £100ish per metre (or per just over a yard). One Italian velvet supplier has some gorgeous stuff - hand cut - a snip at £1500(or so) per metre. In a message dated 27/04/2009 19:00:55 GMT Standard Time, h-costume-requ...@indra.com writes:
At 03:01 AM 4/27/2009, you wrote: >Elena House wrote: >>Wow, you know, this just suddenly put the whole medieval textile >>industry into perspective for me, since the type of design I most want >>to see in brocade is on average at least 50cm x 150cm repeat. You do >>the math for the cost on that one.... > >*nods* > >I saw a nearly perfect all-silk scarlet and yellow brocade, very >medieval, at Britex, more than a dozen years ago, for $150/yard. I >spent quite a while admiring it. > >I suspect that there are suitable top of the line brocades out >there, it's just getting access to the catalogs that places like >Britex uses for their ordering is impossible for the rest of us. >-- >Cynthia Virtue and/or Cynthia du Pre Argent I had the great pleasure of seeing (and touching!) some 100% silk velvets (plain, figured, and cut/uncut) hand-woven in Italy at last month's weavers' guild meeting here in Sacramento, CA. I also found out why the fabrics are only 22-24 inches wide; the velvet wires that are used to get the pile cannot be kept straight in the weaving if the fabric is too wide. Given that one weaver boasted that he could weave 20 cm in a day(!) of a figured velvet (our speaker thought that he was possibly exaggerating a bit), you can see why it costs 350 Euro per meter. Velvets with cut and uncut sections are even more expensive because they are even more labor-intensive and require a very steady hand in cutting just the right portions of the pattern. Even solid colored velvet is very expensive. So, yes, wearing the worth of a manor on one's back is not an exaggeration. Joan Jurancich joa...@surewest.net _______________________________________________ h-costume mailing list h-costume@mail.indra.com http://mail.indra.com/mailman/listinfo/h-costume
