Brenda, you may have seen this coming, but I now have to ask what chemical
lace is please?
Thank you for such great info on the rest of the email, brilliant.
I think that they filming would have been done at different points and the
producer showing what they showed in the time allotted to each program.
I am enjoying watching it though, some reminds mr of my childhood, like you
being involved with mangling clothes, but also with the family research it
gives a possible insight into one branch of the family around that time.
Farming 17 acres of land in the mid late 1800s.
No lacemaker known in that side, but onewife and daughter in the Devon
family whose husband and sons were farm labourers. It feels a bit like
looking through their window watching how they lived.
Sue T
I saw the Saturday repeat. The regular pinned up lappets looked rather
like chemical lace to me, but there wasn't a good enough shot of it to
be sure. Yes, the Christmas lappets were Bedfordshre, or rather
Beds-Maltese with a meandering cloth stitch trail running down the
length of the lace.
I do agree that things were sometimes filmed/shown out of order.
When Ruth was doing the laundry at one point she mentioned starching -
after the laundry had been dried! They didn't use cans of spray-on
starch then It was a case of mixing the starch powder with a little
cold water and then adding boiling water (to cook the starch, much the
same as making
Bird's custard) diluting with more (cold) water and then dipping the
laundry into it followed by mangling and drying.
They showed her using various things like milk or alcohol to loosen
stains, and making up the 'blue' for whitening so I'm surprised they
didn't show the starching process.
I'm old enough to remember my Grandma using a similar mangle in the
1950s. I was allowed to turn the handle but not to feed the washing
into the rollers! They had a separate brick built outhouse for the
laundry and I think the only mod-con was a cold water tap, but there
was probably some sort of boiler to heat the water. Made-up starch and
the blue-bag lived on a high shelf along with soda and a bar of yellow
soap.
BTW, that process of squeezing wet fabric between two rollers is what I
call mangling. Using a rolling pin over wet fabric between towels is
just rolling - like rolling out pastry!
Brenda
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