Begin forwarded message:
From: Patty Dowden <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Date: Thu Dec 11, 2003 04:05:08 US/Eastern To: "Tamara P. Duvall" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: Re: [lace] Re: Threads of antique lace
Devon:
which they analyzed thread from many of their pieces of 17th century lace and
found many different blends of linen and cotton and some of silk. A paper was
published [...]
[...] she suggests that the thread may even have been secretly
adulterated in order to make the expensive linen go farther.
Tamara:
Can't help but wonder though... *Was* cotton really cheaper as early as that? It had to be imported, from far away. While flax grew at home, since it doesn't mind cold weather... Once there were steamships and railways and steam-powered machines in the factories, sure, but, in 17th century or earlier?
Certainly blending silk into linen wasn't done to save money -- silk has always been the more expensive proposition, even after Euope learnt how to produce it. So, perhaps, the rationale behind blending in cotton was something else too (weight? easier to spin finely and smoothly?
esier to take care of, since less heat was required?) For all we know, the reason there's no literature describing such practice stems from it being a ferociously guarded family secret, like lace patterns, baking recipes, silk production, etc... :)
Cotton could be had but there were a lot of technical issues to resolve in spinning a usable thread. The short cotton staple made a hairy thread. Adding it to linen (with it's very, very long fibers) would have been very smart. One also wonders about the silk: was it the leftover broken pieces of silk that are nowadays just spun into thread? Were the combinations of fibers just a "waste not, want not" kind of thriftiness? Were merchants diluting an expensive fiber with odds and ends? Was it a technical experiment?
I always get quite distracted by contemplating how all the 'set' techniques we learn were invented. Everything was invented somewhere, sometime by someone trying to solve a problem. I often wonder how many things we take as 'known' are really mistaken.
Patty Dowden Christmas in Silicon Valley (do I hear a beeping Christmas card?)
"Cotton could be had" (first sentence in Patty's message) and "cotton was cheaper than flax" aren't, necessarily, the same thing :) The first sounds right for 16th and 17th century ; the second more for the 19th... We are so used to thinking of cotton as being inferiour to/cheaper than flax, we assume it had always been so.
But, perhaps, it had *not* always been so... Think of potatoes -- when they were first introduced to Europe (16th c?), they "could be had", but they were rare and considered quite fancy -- royal fare (poor royals <g>). But, by mid 19th c, they were so common, they became the *staple* of poorest of the poor (vide the Irish disaster, when the crop "slimed" two years in a row).
Patty delights in puzzling over the origin of things; I, in sowing doubts on the "givens" dished out as if they were The Word... :)
----- Tamara P Duvall Lexington, Virginia, USA Formerly of Warsaw, Poland http://lorien.emufarm.org/~tpd/
- To unsubscribe send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] containing the line: unsubscribe lace [EMAIL PROTECTED] For help, write to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
