I guess I have to confess that I believed a source and shouldn't have, or I totally misunderstood her: Pam Nottingham was emphatic that she and her students were the first to design flat corners for edging handkerchiefs, in the mid-twentieth C. She must have meant only Bucks because I've just surveyed handkerchiefs in the Met's on-line catalog, and there are lots of flat corners from the 19th C but in other types of lace. I saw only a couple of joins, but the pictures aren't detailed enough to tell whether there are joins hidden in the gathered part around a corner.
Go to https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/ and put in "Handkerchief lace". (without the quotes) Lots of the pieces that come up in the 121 hits are needle lace but there are some really gorgeous pieces so not painful to look at as you look through for the bobbin lace. I think we need to assign Devon to look at all the bobbin lace ones in the Met and tell us how the joins are made. Nancy Connecticut, USA On Sun, Jun 16, 2019 at 2:49 PM N.A. Neff <nancy.a.n...@gmail.com> wrote: > I have few older handkerchiefs so I'm like Devon -- I can't say for sure, > but I think in the ones I have that have gathered corners, there's a quite > visible join. (They are in storage but I will try to dig them out soon.) I > do know that the flat corners are a recent development (i.e., starting in > the mid-20th C), and I agree with Devon, I think lassen may be a recent > development dating from trying to make a continuous flat circular or square > edging -- i.e., no older than mid-20th C. If this is true then there would > be finer thread available (although I'm not sure about the 6-times finer), > because modern straight lace edging is typically worked not much finer than > about 140/2 Egyptian cotton, and there's 185/2 Egyptian cotton readily > available, and I even saw 210/2 Egyptian cotton somewhere recently. > - To unsubscribe send email to majord...@arachne.com containing the line: unsubscribe lace y...@address.here. For help, write to arachne.modera...@gmail.com. Photo site: http://www.flickr.com/photos/lacemaker/sets/
