All posts tagged: terminology

Terminology: Fourchette, quirks and other glove terms

For this terminology post, we’re looking at glove terms: fourchettes, quirks, tranks and points. I love these words just because they are so random and specific. Other than glove makers and fashion historians, who would know that there are specific words for the different parts of gloves? The main piece of a glove, with the back and front of the glove and the tops and bottoms of the fingers all cut in one, with only one side seam, is the trank. It’s shown in pretty pink in the photo above. Going between the fingers, and attached to the trank, is the fourchette (in lovely lavender in the coloured photo above), also called the fork or forge which is: A forked strip of material forming the sides of two adjacent fingers of a glove In other words, this bit: It is from the French, for forked, because a fourchette is forked, and allows the fingers to fork. Some fourchettes have an extra little V gusset at the bottom, called a quirk (shown in beautiful blue in …

Terminology: What is Dazzle?

Published by The Dreamstress

‘Dazzle‘ (or ‘Razzle-Dazzle, or Dazzle Camouflage) was an early use of camouflage in modern warfare. It looked like this: And this: Starting in WWI, Allied ships, and, less frequently, airplanes, canons and tents, were painted in a series of broken stripes and intersecting geometric shapes – not to hide an object, but to confuse, or ‘dazzle’ the eyes of observers. The point was not to conceal a ship, but to make it hard to tell precisely what kind of ship it was, where a ship was, which direction it was going in, and how fast it was travelling. The goal of Dazzle, as the British Admiralty explained was: …to make it look as if your stern was where your head ought to be. If you think that a Dazzle painted ship looks like a cubist artwork, you’re absolutely right. The concept of Dazzle is generally credited to artist Norman Wilkinson (though zooologist John Graham Kerr had earlier proposed a disruption system inspired by animal camouflage). He knew that steamships could not be hidden because of …

HSF/M ’15: Challenge #2: Blue

Published by The Dreamstress

The theme for the Historical Sew Monthly 2015 Challenge #2 is Blue: make something in any shade of blue. I knew it would be a popular colour challenge choice because blue is simply the most popular colour: it’s more peoples favourite colour than any other. Historically, it’s also been one of the most desirable colours in many historical periods and cultures, because the dyes used to achieve it were comparatively expensive and finicky, and the harder something is to achieved, the more expensive it is, and the more people want it. In addition to being an expensive dye, blue acquired even more cachet in Europe in the Middle Ages when it became the colour associated with the robes of the Virgin Mary in devotional art. Mary was painted in blue robes partly because blue was the colour of the heavens, but mostly because the most expensive paint available was ultramarine blue. Mary was deemed worthy of only this rarest hue, this colour ‘from beyond the seas’, so was depicted in blue robes, often highlighted with …