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Carpal Tunnel
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The text doesn't use this word, which refers to penalties for wearing finery. The preceding chapter described some women being fined for wearing jewelry, or other expensive adornments.
"They wore neither rings nor gold crosses, and it was easy to see that, in their ease, this did not proceed from poverty, but simply from fear of being fined. "
Here's a URL about sumptuary laws:
http://renaissance.dm.net/sumptuary/
WindowsXP won't let me make the URL clickable.
I am completely ignorant about econonmics. But I think that part of the reason for the sumptuary laws was that so much money went out of the country to buy such foreign luxuries that there was actually a chronic shortage of the coin necessary for governemental expenditures.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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crocheting, a relatively new 'neeedlework craft' was born out of sumptuary laws. some of the sumptuary laws regulated who could wear lace, and how much. (especially the laws of England and France, since much of the best lace was imported from Brussels, Spain and Italy)
but like modern day drug laws, they outlawed real lace, (usually made from silk and sometimes from silk and linen), not copy cats.
crochet, sometimes called 'lace made in the air', can mimic real lace (nowdays called pillow lace because it is constructed from bobbins of thread, held in place by pins on a 'pillow' when being constructed), but was ususally exempted--because it was a) cotton, and b)locally made, not imported.
crocheting became a popular craft almost over night. Irish lace, is one of the few remaining examples of style of fine cotton lace that can be made with crochet. It got its start in the 1840, when nuns from france taught it to irish girls, as a mean for them to earn money during the time of the famine. Crochet was much more popular in france than it ever was in england.
nowdays, very few people crochet with the super fine (sewing thread weight) cotton used for irish lace.
(thread are measured by a number, the higher the number, the finer the thread. most crochet cotton today is size 10, some is size 30 or 40, irish crochet uses size 80!
(embroidery thread (all six strands together) is size 5)
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Carpal Tunnel
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Thanks, of troy. I remember my grandmother doing something called "tatting", that produced something a bit like crocheting. Please comment on that as an encore.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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Here's another quote from a later chapter:
"My dear," continued Fleur-de-Lys, with decided sharpness, "You will get yourself taken up by the sumptuary police for your gilded girdle."
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Carpal Tunnel
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Well, i sort of know how to tat, but i don't know anything much about the craft. its very old.
tatting, and net making (as in fishing nets) are the same 'knots' and same technique. even the shuttle used in tatting looks like the shuttle used in net making, only its all smaller. Usually tatting is not done in big sheets (but i do have a pair of tatted gloves!) but in narrow bands, that are closed into loops or rings, and these are knotted together (with the same stitch as use to knot the egde of a fish net!) to create lace.
i don't really know anyone who tats, and i found it slow going (but i did make a collar and cuffs once) but i have read that good tatters can go quite fast. nowdays, the only place one sees tatting is as a fill in word in a crossword puzzle (current editor uses lace=tat all the time
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but sumptuary laws also gave us 'the bonfires of the vanities', in case you ever wondered where that phrase came from.
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