A little while ago I was blogging about an interesting old Paisley Shawl which I'm currently listing on eBay. I didn't know whether it had been mended or not, because it seemed to fall into two semi matching halves. Now that it has finally stopped raining here I have been able to hang this fabulous textile up outside in the garden and get a better look at it. It seems obvious now (as it wasn't before!) that the divide is quite intentional. This would have been folded in the middle and then worn as a wrap, with one or other side showing - and as somebody pointed out to me, it would look as though the lady wearing it possessed two somewhat different shawls!
3 comments:
Stumbled upon your blog and got interested since I just found a shawl with a similar irregularity of the centre piece, on auction sale here in Sweden. Your theory of "two shawls in one" was very attractive to me (planning to bid on the item), until a thought struck me: The size, shape, pattern and colour indicate the second half of the 19th century, the era of the very wide, voluminous crinoline skirts. As I have understood it, shawls by then often were draped horisontally, so to speak, over the back of the skirt, or even over the shoulders, covering the whole back of the dress and in either way displaying the centre pattern in full. The lady with the two shawls covered - and uncovered! So: it seems to me that the paisley pattern puzzle remains to be solved.
(The auction mentiond above ends on Febr. 2nd so there is no time to lose!)
Have you consulted the Victorian and Albert Museum or the Paisley Museum? Someone there ought to know.
Anyone out there knowing?
With hopes and best regards,
Agneta in Sweden
Stumbled upon your blog and got interested since I just found a shawl with a similar irregularity of the centre piece, on auction sale here in Sweden. Your theory of "two shawls in one" was very attractive to me (planning to bid on the item), until a thought struck me: The size, shape, pattern and colour indicates the second half of the 19th century, the era of the very wide, voluminous crinoline skirts. As I have understood it, shawls by then often were draped horisontally, so to speak, over the back of the skirt, or even over the shoulders, covering the whole back of the dress and in either way displaying the centre pattern in full. The lady with the two shawls covered - and uncovered! So: it seems to me that the paisley pattern puzzle remains to be solved.
(The auction mentiond above ends on Febr. 2nd so there is no time to lose!)
Have you consulted the Victorian and Albert Museum or the Paisley Museum? Someone there ought to know.
Anyone out there knowing?
With hopes and best regards,
Agneta in Sweden
Hi there and many thanks for your interesting comments. The person who bought this shawl was a collector who also thought that it was intended to be folded in the middle, so that it looked like two different shawls. We are actually based quite near Paisley and I do sometimes consult them about my collection but she was so sure about this one that I thought she was probably right! You're right about the crinolines of course, but I don't think the shawls were necessarily always draped horizontally - although it was sometimes the way they were painted in pictures, for effect. But these extremely large shawls were, so I believe, folded in two and then draped over the shoulders with the half shawl displayed over the crinoline at the back. They would be fastened with a brooch of some sort, in front. I've found a few illustrations of this method of wear.
All very interesting - hope you manage to buy your shawl. They aren't all Scottish, and the buyer of this one thought that it might possibly be French.
Best wishes,
Catherine
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