In message <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Jenny Brandis <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes >I hate reading a blog and finding something related to lace left hanging ...... > >http://www.alamut.com/past/0502.html > >Jan 1 raised a lace issue but he/she never gets around to adding more info. >Any idea idea if they are right ?? > ". It took a good lacer up to two hours to make just one inch. At their largest ruffs were 9" wide. It can take about 5 yards to make a full ruff. If you were using 3" wide lace, every yard of 9" wide ruff would be made up of 9 yards of 3" wide lace sewn together. That means that it takes 45 yards x 36" x 2hr., or 3240 man hours. That would be a year of 10 hr. days."
The maths is wrong, though - three one yard strips of 3" wide lace would be a total of 3 yards, not 9! 3 x 5 is 15, so at 72 hours/yard/strip, 15x72 is 1080 hours, or eighteen weeks of ten hour days (if they had Sundays off). It is probably a good estimate of the amount required, but one of the English lace groups (it was in Lace an issue or so back) has been working on Elizabethan costume lace for the Royal Shakespeare Company so if any of that group are on Arachne they would be able to confirm... so would my grandma, who was wardrobe mistress to the Royal Shakespeare Touring Company in the early 1900s (she ended up with a part as an extra in Merchant of Venice in South Africa in 1903 when one of the actresses was taken ill) - but unfortunately she died in 1962. As a comparison of sorts, it took me four months to tambour 6 yards of 2" edging for a veil for City & Guilds, working five hours a day (my shoulders were painful if I tried to do more than that), and that flat edged a 5 ft diameter veil. (It also gained my place in the CLG Five Metre Club - you don't *have* to do bobbin lace!). Elizabeth, of course, also brought in laws that only the high nobility could wear lace - probably as well they were the only ones who could afford it! In a book on British costume history I have (published in 1834 or thereabouts), is record of the yellow ruffs made fashionable in England by a Dutch woman. I think the ruff was made and then dyed, rather than the lace being worked in dyed thread, and apparently the fashion didn't last long as she was beheaded (or something) along with others involved in one of the plots. I'm not sure if it was Elizabeth or James they were plotting against, though - must get time to read it through again. -- Jane Partridge - To unsubscribe send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] containing the line: unsubscribe lace [EMAIL PROTECTED] For help, write to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
