It was definitely the photocopy machine that led to the adoption of blue
film. When I started taking lace lessons in 1971 my teacher pricked the
prickings. She would draw them on graph paper because it is "more accurate to
prick the intersection of two lines, than a dot". Then she would prick
through several layers of a brown card on a surface of piano felt. She also
had
a diagram which she had copied using pencil and tracing paper from some
master diagram and colored with fine felt tipped pens. Then she would wrap the
tracing paper around a piece of white cardboard to make an immaculate
little diagram. I believe it was originally standard practice to give the
diagram to the student to trace on tracing paper, etc., but it being 1971 and
the
library being equipped with a xerox machine that made copies on awful clay
covered paper, she suggested that I photocopy the diagram and then color
it with pens. I still have some of these relics of a bygone era of
photocopying.
The entire process was so labor intensive that I can remember now where I
was when I first saw someone whip out some blue film and put it on a
pattern. It was after my daughter was born in 1985, but before she started
school, and my husband let me take an evening lace class once a week while he
watched the baby. It was somewhat revolutionary in that prior to that I had to
buy the prickings or else try to find a source for piano felt.
I have often seen quite identical looking patterns to the ones produced by
my teacher in bins of old patterns in lace communities, usually dark tan,
as hers were. So, I don't know if that was because the dark tan was
considered the best for the eyes, or was the most widely available.
I don't know when people stopped using vellum. I suspect it may have
persisted longer in needle lace than in bobbin lace. I have always been a
little
bit suspicious that the Ipswich lace pillows were redone, if not actually
made new during the fever of excitement that occurred during the US
centennial in 1876. A lace pillow that doesn't show a lace in process is not
much
of an exhibit item, so it would make sense to set it up in order to provide
the teaching experience of seeing what lace making as it was practiced in
Ipswich looked like. So, they may be more indicative of the lace practices
of the 1870s, than of the 18th century.
Of course there are many stories of people using some kind of black
substance (related to shoe maintenance?) to transfer a pricked pattern from
one
pricking to another piece of card when the first was worn out.
This leads inevitably to the question of what did people do with grubby,
discolored lace in the olden days, and the answer was that the dealer
whitened it with white lead. Unfortunately white lead tends to cause lead
poisoning resulting in the conclusion that not every substance used in the 19th
century was healthful, and also the conclusion that it might be a good idea to
wash your hands after handling old lace.
I really think it was also the classroom situation with a desire to "prick
and go" that led to the use of the film, especially if the teacher did not
want to prick all the patterns ahead of time, or for that matter carry
them with her. Of course at that time it would have been impossible to
transfer a pattern to a piece of card without visiting a specialty reproduction
service, and most photocopying was being done in offices on white paper (often
at the boss's expense :-)). We didn't have home printers. If you were
going to prick a pattern at home, in its entirely, before starting it, you
might as well afix the photocopy to the card with pins and prick though,
although you would still have to add any construction detail lines, like gimp
by
hand, which was a bother. My first teacher persisted in doing things the
traditional way and was porting her entire inventory of prickings in
multiple suitcases when I took a class with her around 1990, at a local
museum.
But she was very unusual in that regard.
Surely others recall the pre-blue film days?
Devon
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