On 1/26/2010 8:41 PM, Käthe Barrows wrote:
Question: are?there any historical ?references to this method in other times?
Hippies didn't care if the mends showed, where Victorians/Edwardians
did. So earlier mends were as invisible as the craft of the
seamstress could produce.
I've put directions for 19th-century mending techniques in some of my
books. Mending techniques for linens run to darning. On surviving
examples of underlinen and table linen, the darns are usually (not
always) neat, but by no means invisible. Linens too damaged to darn were
patched, neatly but not invisibly, and the material cut away underneath.
The more expensive the article, the more invisible the mending
technique. Fine lace was mended with lace-making techniques, and fine
cashmere shawls were mended with reweaving techniques imitating the
original weave.
Dress materials were often recycled. The stained and worn parts were
often discarded, but sometimes some had to be used and were covered
over. One method for doing so was beading, made even more economical by
recycling beads saved from damaged bead trimmings. Another method was
covering the bad parts with multiple rows of presumably inexpensive
braid. Flounces and ruffles sometimes covered bad material on skirts.
The difference between the Victorian/Edwardian and 1960s/1970s
philosophies, is that for the Victorians and Edwardians it was routine,
and for the hippies it was "Look, I'm recycling!" If the Victorians and
Edwardians used trimming to cover bad material, they made sure to
arrange the material where trimming could logically be located. The
hippies put the trimming anywhere.
Fran
Lavolta Press
Books on historic clothing
http://www.lavoltapress
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