I have just read Marta Cotterell Raffel's book on Ipswich lace. [...]
One peculiarity is that they made their foot side on the left like continentals do, rather than on the right like the English do.
I picked up my copy on Friday and have just finished reading it today. What caught my attention (and amused me; I'm easily amused) are the diagrams for the reproduced patterns. Could be the publisher's fault but, all claims of the left-hand foot to the contrary, prickings 4 & 5 (the ones with Kat Stitch ground) show it on the right-hand side... Doesn't matter in the case of the Spanish ground (honecomb at 45 degre) since the pins are closed, but it sure makes a difference when the pins are open...
Also, Cotterell says that, during the Colonial Revival (a 100 or so yrs after the industry ceased as industry), the ladies immitated the old laces exactly, down to the foot on the left, with the only difference being the use of pins in the ground. She "spotlights" the ground difference with 2 photos -- figs 14 and 15 (p 31). But, if you look at the "revival" pricking (and the ladies, quite obviously, did not *pre-prick* the pattern but pricked "on the go" -- bad practice <g>), at what's been already done and what's yet to be worked... the foot's on the *right*...
It would be nice to know whether the Ipswich lacemakers fossilized an earlier English tradition, were influenced by Continental techniques, or simply "drifted" (that's what happened to me; I learnt with foot on the right, but after a year or so of making tapes/braids -- foot on both sides -- emereged at the other end of the tunnel with a firm idea that the foot was supposed to be on the *left* <g>)... But I doubt it would ever be possible to establish for certain-sure. One'd need a *whole bunch* of pillows, fully dressed (pricking and bobbins/lace in place to show the direction of work), all reliably dated to before mid-18th century to do that. Ipswich has enough of them to prove that point, but Ipswich was almost a flash-in-the-pan as lace industry, besides being a "lace skansen" of sorts -- the only place in the US where it *was* an industry.
In England, you also have "dedicated villages", but there are many, and they lasted longer (for various reasons). So, pillows would have got "re-dressed" to the prevailing fashion and the artifacts are likely to point to "right foot forward"...
IMO, we'll never *know* :) ----- Tamara P Duvall mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Lexington, Virginia, USA Formerly of Warsaw, Poland
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