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<[email protected]>,
[email protected] writes
So I CAN make it but doubt very much if I could make Battenburg tape.
I fail to see why you shouldn't be able to, having from necessity made a
fair proportion of the tapes in my Branscombe Point "Castle Class Loco
and Tender" that I worked for City & Guilds. The necessity was based on
the colour and thickness of the tapes in order to match the threads I
was working with - I could (and did) buy black tape from Belgium, but
not the green, oily silver metallic, gold or black with orange lining -
so it was out with the bobbins, six pairs plus footside down either
side. Branscombe tape is narrow, and doesn't have a gathering thread
(you overcast the edge to achieve the curve), but if you were to make
Battenberg tape (I'm sure Jane S once pointed out that the tape was
named after the mountain, not the cake) you would need a thicker thread
- similar to a coarse thread in Honiton - down each side to act as the
gathering thread - in cloth stitch, this wouldn't cause any problems.
Some tapes have picot edges, sometimes a white tape with a gold or
silver picot edge - again, this can be done with bobbins.
After discussion Jane and I came to the conclusion that the machine made
tape laces came into being around 1840-1850, and that before that there
was a good possibility that other similar laces were made using bobbin
produced tape - the idea was that these laces would imitate bobbin lace
and be faster to work..... yes, well, there are many things that will go
down in history as "it seemed like a good idea at the time" as
needlelace can be deceptively slow going!
For those who don't know the difference, Battenberg has very open
fillings - woven wheels, bars and picots, etc holding the tape in shape,
and the curves are produced by drawing up the gathering threads
according to the curves of the lace. Branscombe imitates Honiton Lace
and is also known as Honiton Point - the two towns being very close
together geographically - the fillings are complex, and the tapes do not
have the gathering threads - you carefully overcast (whip) into every
stitch along the inside of the curves, and it is almost like magic when
you take the lace off the pad, dampen and press it - you would never
believe that the tape was straight to start with!
The techniques were very popular projects in women's magazines at the
turn of the 20th Century, and a lot of Edwardian dresses used the lace
for decoration.
Romanian lace has a totally different texture, but is common in its
method of working to the tape laces. Braid laces, on the other hand, are
totally worked with bobbins, and cover laces as far ranging as Russian
and Milanese. I'm not sure how long the separation of the terms "tape"
and "braid" in English lace vocabulary have been kept distinct -
certainly we were taught to be pedantic about it when I was studying for
C&G parts 1&2 - between 1994 and 1999. However, around 1994 both terms
were used for the bobbin laces of the ilk. There are still many lace
terms which have more than one name - eg workers which can also be
runners or weavers - within the same country, depending on regional
dialect (ie the type of lace being made). We are trying to iron out the
confusion caused by "whole stitch" (ctc or ctct?) in standardizing
terms, but lace thrives in its diversity, and the terminology that goes
with each lace - it would be awfully dull if we only had one type of
lace to make, wouldn't it?
--
Jane Partridge
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