More Lace

I am over yesterday and gearing up for a kids halloween party tonight. I think I will be the wicked witch of Gellibrand.
Spent more time exploring lace yesterday. I have posted photos of my great aunts and uncles on my fathers side of the family ( oh and if you click on the photo a larger version comes up) and they like my great grandmother are dressed in the costume of the islands of southern Holland known as Zeeland. Their mutsen are rather more austere and this is likely to be due to the fact that they lived in a fairly tight hugeunot community in Walcheren. I like the fact that the men wore ornament as much as the women and I remember my grandfather had pierced ears because the men also wore ear rings. The young woman in the bottom right has a long lace cap- this indicates that she was unmarried. The mutsen told much of a woman's standing and place in the community and were a type of code in a sense. The drochel lace is from the eighteenth century which I purchased in Brugge ( the Venice of the North). I bought this lace ,as it was likely to have been worn by the women in my families- this particular piece was all I could afford but it is quite fine linen which is of course why Belgium was the centre of much lace making- the water in the rivers was conducive to the right sort of fermentation of the flax to produce fine linen.