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4.5
Veronica Main’s beautifully illustrated book Straw Plaiting is the living link to a nearly lost art.In the 19th century—when men, women and children alike all wore headgear—many thousands of workers in England, the United States, Switzerland, and other countries around the world were employed in the international industry that turned straw into hats. In the midlands of England, the trade was so ubiquitous that for many children, going to school didn’t even mean learning to read and write. It meant learning to plait.** Some began before their third birthday, learning by doing, starting with the simplest tasks. By the time they had fully mastered plaiting skills as young adults, their fingers flew so fast that outsiders could not figure out how the complicated patterns were being created.This thriving industry declined in the last third of the 19th century, transformed by technological change and drowned by imports from China and Japan. Without jobs for younger workers, there was no need to learn the skills by which the older generation had earned a living, and as the older plaiters died, their skills died with them. By the time this book was written, the English plaiting industry had been moribund for well over a hundred years.With the last practitioners gone from living memory, author Veronica Main had to reconstruct both the history of the industry and its working methods from the scattered evidence preserved in museums and libraries: historical accounts and statistics, surviving tools and plait samples, and a few surviving straw hats and bonnets. This book documents what she learned through decades of study, analysis and practical experiment, in the hope that others will be inspired to keep these skills alive. She was named an MBE (Member of the British Empire) in honor of her efforts to preserve this critically endangered heritage.Straw Plaiting is a substantial and scholarly book, encompassing over 300 pages in the main body of the book, with additional footnotes, glossary, index, and tables to convert metric and imperial measurements. It is logically organized, well-designed, beautifully illustrated, and easy to use. The first half includes a history of the industry, the countries involved, and the reasons for its decline. It goes on to discuss the tools and materials used in the past, how the straw was prepared and split, and the development of the designs.The second part of the book, 175 pages, presents detailed instructions teaching the modern reader how to recreate the designs, which have evocative names such as “Porcupine,” “Batwing,” “Feather” and “Wisp.” First Main describes how to select straws appropriate for plaiting and how to sort, split, bleach and dye them. Then she provides general instructions for manipulating the prepared straw – how to begin, end, and add new working ends, and how to keep the materials damp enough to be pliable to fold. The plaiting instructions begin with simple designs requiring as few as three “ends,” and work up to complex designs requiring 16 ends, followed by a section on trimmings. All the instructions have very clear, large diagrams as well as very clear photographs of original examples.I recommend this book without reservation not only for historians, re-enactors, and costume specialists, but also for anyone interested in the preservation of manual skills in general, given the distressing decline of manual dexterity observed in lives dominated by screens.**The process of intertwining the straw, called braiding in the US, is called plaiting in the UK (rhymes with “batting”) and plaiting is the term used in this book.
