I was always been taught that laces such as Russian and Milanese are braid
laces and some of the fillings are done with plaits. Tape lace is a machine
made tape tacked onto the pattern and secured with sewing and needle made
fillings.
However, since I have been exposed to American terminology on Arachne I have
been very aware that as you refer to plaits (in lace and hair) as braids, it
is necessary that you refer to the hand made "edges" as tapes.
<VBG> Throw into the mix someone who learnt *British* English in Poland, but who ended up in US, which is where she'd learnt lace, from books (of mixed origins)... and you get total confusion, without any rhyme or reason :)
*To me*, what one does with 3 (hair) or 4 (bobbins) strands is a "plait". Which I prefer to see written, because I've, quite consistenly, been mispronouncing it for 47 years (I say: "pleyt", not "plat"). But a cord, that's "braided", not "plaited"; go figure... I suppose, on the "if it's flat, it's a plait" principle (might help with my ponounciation too <g>)...
Russian and similiar (Idria etc) -- ie a plain-ish (cloth or half stitch), narrow, meandering "thing" with fillings made "on the go" -- that's "tape lace", *to me*. That's because the Brit books referred to it as "Russian" lace, which was misleading in the extreme (not all Russian lace is tape and vice versa; not all tape lace is Russian). I wasn't comfortable with the term, and so embraced the "tape" concept with gratitude as soon as I'd seen it (have forgotten where)...
But Milanese... Now, that's a *braid* lace :) I learnt it from the Read/Kincaid books, for one thing, and that's the term Pat Read uses, so it stuck. But also, it wasn't difficult for me to "internalize" and accept the difference in terminology, because of the great difference in the *lace*. The meandering "thing" in Milanese isn't narrow, isn't plain, and the fillings -- *if any* -- aren't made "on the go"; they're added after. So, again, *to me*, "braid" is more complex than "plait". As far as I'm concerned, only two laces "belong" in that group: Milanese and Chrysanthemum. And, of the 2, Chrysanthemum is "iffy", "on the fence", as it were, since it uses only one decorated braid (and that not always) and makes its (simple) fillings "on the go"...
Have never "resolved", to my own satisfaction, the Honiton, Brugge and Duchesse (including the Withof version). Or Rosaline and Cantu. Each of those has some features of one kind, some of another...
what generic term do you normally use to describe what I would think of as a tape lace to make it clear that it is not hand made bobbin lace but a mix of machine tape and needlelace?
Sometimes, like Robin:
I usually avoid the braid/tape controversy by calling the other kind "Battenberg family" or "lace made with pre-fab tapes".
Mostly, I used to *think* (being the minority of one <g>) of it as "ribbon and needlelace". But I've been getting more and more dissatisfied with *that* also. Because, on the one hand, you have the Princesse lace (the machine-made "ribbon", the needle-lace fillings, but the lot applied to -- machine-made -- net). And, on the other hand, you have the laces where the "ribbon" *isn't*; it's a *cord*, not flat at all. And that cord can be either hand-made (like in Romanian lace that Angela is spreading in the Western world), or machine-made (like the Chinese? products, where the outlines seem to be made of very long shoe-laces). "Ribbon and needlelace" works for Battenberg and Branscombe, and, with some "extra", for Princesse, but not for those.
So, I'm as deep in the mud-pile as ever, and have learnt to ask what is meant, *specifically*, whenever I see the term "tape" mentioned :)
----- Tamara P Duvall Lexington, Virginia, USA Formerly of Warsaw, Poland http://lorien.emufarm.org/~tpd/
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