Oddly, I have been given a copy of an article by someone in Australia. There was a piece of lace that was on a ship that was wrecked off Australia in 1629 thus giving an actual date that the piece was in existance. The Maritime Museum's lab there did a fiber analysis on the lace and determined that it was linen with cotton fibers added to the linen. Subsequently the woman was allowed to do a fiber analysis on laces from the same era at the Powerhouse museum and a sizable majority of them also had cotton fibers with the linen. This is rather interesting since generally, people think that cotton wasn't used in lace until the 1800's.
Clearly the challenge is to relate our study to some other discipline, ie. Maritime History, or Shroud of Turin studies. There seems to be unlimited funds for some innately intriquing fields, whereas lace is sort of the low man on the totem pole among textiles and textiles are the low man on the totem pole in art. Devon - To unsubscribe send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] containing the line: unsubscribe lace [EMAIL PROTECTED] For help, write to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
