Today, I got a little e-snippet about Polish lacemaking from my cousin's son. He'd been listening to the radio and reports a big "to-do" in the village of Koniakow... :)
Koniakow is a village in the south of Poland where, for the past 100 yrs or so, almost every woman has been making crochet lace for sale. The lace is somewhat similiar to the Irish crochet in that it's "pieced" and in that it's 3-D, but the design elements which have evolved there over the years are quite different and unique. The lace is fairly coarse, but quite lovely.
Well...
For years and years, it has been all doilies and tablecloths and collars. You could buy them -- in Warsaw anyway -- either at the "folk stores" (CPLiA), or at the airport's duty-free store.
But lace doilies, collars, and tablecloths don't fit today's lifestyle all that well, and the women were hurting for lack of sales. So some of the more enterprising ones came up with a novel solution: they're producing lace G-strings and bras, using the same traditional techniques... The traditionalists are having conniption fits at the selective use of tradition; even during the "red regime" (communism) such obsccenity would not have been tolerated, and Poland is now supposed to be under the *black* (Catholic) one... :)
My cousin's son didn't say whether the more daring lacemakers were, indeed, making better money at their craft with this new "line"...
This is my last posting on lace for the week; I'm "off to the laces" tomorrow morning -- driving over to Pittsburgh, PA (ca 350 miles -- an unprecedented event for me; keep your fingers crossed <g>). On Friday, Robin (Panza) and I are driving to Ithaca for the excitement (and workshops <g>)
----- Tamara P Duvall Lexington, Virginia, USA Formerly of Warsaw, Poland http://lorien.emufarm.org/~tpd/
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