I sent Catherine via email a photo of a spool of thread that I studied during a demonstration of Alencon by the school in Alencon in 2014. It seemed like a normal spool of fine cotton thread to me, not anything unavailable on the market. I noted that in a video they showed at the museum the thread was in skein form. So, I donât know if this means that they used to use a thread in skein form, and now have to get spools. Laurie Waters, who taught an Alencon class at the convention had obtained skeins of antique thread on ebay and that is the format that they used in about 1980 when she visited Alencon. Another possibility I suppose is that they could use different threads in different formats, but they didnât bother to bring a skein to the demonstration. For readers of the Bulletin, this was the demonstration in which under my persistent questioning about materials, it was revealed that the horsehair is not from the tail of the male horses, but rather from the forelock! This was fascinating because we in Laurie Watersâ class had measured the horse hair, using a computer microscope, in the antique Alencon and found it was thinner than any of the horse hair in any of the whisks, etc, that Laurie had collected as horsehair samples. In fact the hair was closer in size to our own hair. So that was quite puzzling until I was told in Alencon that the hair was from the forelock of the horse and the horse was from the Royal Stables of Le Pen and this had always been the case! However, in the endless search for suitable thread, I encountered another interesting idea. Kumiko Nakazaki was teaching Binche in NJ. I was making a piece in cotton and it didnât look much like the sample Kumiko had made. Kumiko told me that there is a kind of cotton thread, and I think she said it was available in Bruges, that had a hand, or somehow behaved like the old linen thread. I think it was an antique thread and she didnât seem to know how old it might be. When I threw out suggestions like 1950, and 1910, she couldnât even give me a ball park type of answer. So, I am totally intrigued with the idea that you could make a cotton thread that behaved like the old linen thread. Has anyone else heard of this? This sounds like a challenge for Bart and Francis.
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