I'm pretty sure this wasn't meant to be a private message: At 06:35 PM 8/6/04 +1000, Helene Gannac wrote:
>Joy wrote: >> ...In the U.S., we call it "unbleached muslin". In the forties and >> fifties, it was the cheapest fabric around and was frequently made into >> sheets and pillowcases. To this day, people on Sewinglist refer to >> test-the-pattern projects as "muslins". (I think the U.K. people say >> "toiles".) (*Somebody* says "toile".) > The French call a test-the-pattern piece of clothing made of muslin a > "toile" because originally, it was made with the same, or very similar > fabric that the one painters use for oil paintings, and that is also > called a "toile" I'm not sure of the origin of the word, I haven't got my > big Larousse with me! > "Mousseline" (material from Mussel) is much lighter, nearly like voile. > Which itself is a misnomer, as "voile" in French means also a ship's sail, > not thin and vaporous at all...:-) > > has anyone read "Eats, shoots and leaves" about punctuation? Wonderfully > funny, just the thing for Tamara! > > helene, the froggy from Melbourne ------------------------ According to my little Cassell, it went: linen, linen cloth; cloth; canvas; sail-cloth, sail; (Paint) canvas for painting . . . All the meanings listed seem to come directly from the idea of "cloth" -- "*toile metallique*, wire gauze", for example, seems to mean what we Americans call "hardware cloth" when coarse, and "windowscreen" when fine -- except nowadays window screens are made of perforated plastic film that a cat can claw through, which is why we decided to let Erica out. I'd wager the idea of "toile" as "test-the-pattern garment" came from the idea of making a pattern out of fabric so that you could test it. A *proper* muslin is taken apart and used as a pattern, though one-off garments -- particularly re-enactment garments -- are sometimes fitted with their linings or underlinings. (I make myself a gardening shirt with some lovely linen-cotton plaid shirting I bought for a dollar a yard, wear it for a while, correct the paper pattern, and make another one. I need a couple more blue-plaid shirts; luckily, I also need a new bodice sloper.) Some workers pin tissue patterns around the subject in order to get an idea of how the garment will fit, and there's a special "pattern paper" that's really a cheap grade of non-woven interfacing, which allows for pin-fitting. I'm planning to read _Eats, Shoots, and Leaves_ if I ever get my hands on it. -- Joy Beeson [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://home.earthlink.net/~joybeeson/ west of Fort Wayne, Indiana, U.S.A. where it's cool enough to leave the doors open. To unsubscribe send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] containing the line: unsubscribe lace-chat [EMAIL PROTECTED] For help, write to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
