Thank you Diana for reminding me about the striver pins. I will put some with my things. Another Arachne participant sent me privately the following message: I just found this online, https://hands-across-the-sea-samplers.com/lace-tells/ It seems possible it was to pick up thread used in a sewing or perhaps a thread gone astray?
This is a very informative blog post, but it is hard to know where the information came from. It is claimed that children as young as six were expected to work for as much as 8 hours a day and by the age of fifteen girls were expected to spend at least 12 hours a day at their pillows. They were not allowed to talk and had infrequent breaks. In this article it is claimed that âNeedle pinâ was a tool and âstitch upon stitchâ sewing. âWork an old lady out of the ditchâ pull your sewing loop through.â Here it would be interesting to know where the tell originated. I have been mostly thinking about the tells as being used in Buckinghamshire, making a continuous lace. But, if one were doing a lot of sewings, it would have to be in the Honiton area. Thomas Wright in the Romance of the Lace Pillow claims that the âold lady out of the ditchâ tell is from Renhold. But Renhold is in Buckinghamshire on the River Ouse. So, I am not so sure about the concept that it is a sewing, since the piece that I am doing, Running River, alleged to refer to the River Ouse itself (Pamela Nottingham) has no sewings. Thomas Wright seems to be the authority on much of what is written. As in this article, he refers to a âglumâ. It seems that they said the rhyme. Then there was a period of silence, the glum, while they worked, and the first child to complete something (20 pins?) called out and was the winner. I am undecided about whether these lace schools were Dickensian work houses where children were forced in silence to work all day adhering to rigorous standards of quality, or whether they were more like kindergartens where they were inspired with rhymes and competitions while their harried elders tried to get something reasonably salable out of them. I have to say that I personally have never been very adept at turning small children in to models of industrial production. As I recall, my own kindergarten experience was that we sang and played games and listened to stories and colored pictures with crayons, with the goal of each of us being able to write our names at the end of a year. Devon Sent from Mail for Windows 10 From: Diana Smith Sent: Tuesday, November 21, 2017 6:15 PM To: DevonThein Cc: Arachne Subject: Re: [lace] Work the old lady out of the ditch-lace tell How they kept count? - I think this might be where the âStriverâ or âKing pinâ was used. Placing a decorated pin on the footside where they began a repeat, on completing that pattern or number of rows/pins they would put in another âstriverâ thereby âstrivingâ to complete the pattern and so on. They would be able to see at a glance how much work they had accomplished. I hope that is understandable! Iâm presuming that you know about the decorated pins used by the East Midlands Lace makers? Diana in Northamptonshire > On 21 Nov 2017, at 20:10, DevonThein <[email protected]> wrote: > > What does it mean to work the old lady out of the ditch? I seem to recall that > it had something to do with working the worker through the edge. But is that > all? In Running River that would mean a catch pin, two linen, the edge stitch > and bac through the two linen. > Or does it mean work the entire little area of tulle ground until you canât > go any farther. > > They seemed to count things in units of 20 pins. Does anyone know how they > kept the pins for reference? Did they count them onto a pin cushion? If they > removed them in groups of twenty, that would seem to slow you down a bit since > you have to count them as you remove them. In the tulle area you go through > twenty pretty fast. > > Also, with the counting tells, it would seem that a systemic rhythm would be > difficult since the pattern determines how often you place a pin. In the tulle > area you would place them much faster than in the cloth stitch river area. > > Also, do you think these children did it really fast, or really slow? I can > see adults could do it fast. (My wrists are hurting from the practice session > I just had.) But not so sure about children, especially ones who are > memorizing and reciting rhymes. I am going to have someone read them to me > while I work. No way can I recite a long rhyme and also do the pattern. > > Devon > > > Sent from Mail for Windows 10 > > - > To unsubscribe send email to [email protected] containing the line: > unsubscribe lace [email protected]. For help, write to > [email protected]. Photo site: > http://www.flickr.com/photos/lacemaker/sets/ - To unsubscribe send email to [email protected] containing the line: unsubscribe lace [email protected]. For help, write to [email protected]. Photo site: http://www.flickr.com/photos/lacemaker/sets/
