"Rebecca" arrived this morning and she is absoutely spectacular. I will post some detail pics later. I don't see anything modern here. Here are some things I've noted:
**The body is stuffed with printed fabric that looks like flour sack cloth. You can see brightly colored floral fabric through the body fabric.
**There is a lot of staining, so much that it almost looks faked, but it is consistant with protected areas of the dress, like inside pleats and folds are light colored, exposed outer areas are age stained. Looks like she was put carefully away for a very long time and not moved much, not laundered and not ironed, but packed away.
**Everything is very stable, no loose seams and no holes.
**All the machine stitching is straight stitch, like what I do on my treadle machine. No zig-zag stitching anywhere and not perfectly done. No doubt this is homemade.
**The rose on the waistband is definitely handmade and not secured with plastic like the modern ones, it is hard, and coiled and formed ribbon, hardened with some type of starch to hold its shape.
**I'm discovering that machine made lace can be very old, it was available in the early 19th century, so that does not help to pinpoint a date. The lace is clearly not modern and definitely antique, especially the brown lace hanging from the bow which is quite soft and fragile. Here's a great article on identifying handmade and machine made lace:
http://www.dressandtextilespecialists.org.uk/Lace%20Booklet.pdf**All of the fibers are cotton, I pulled apart a thread that was loose and unattached, it was definitely 100% cotton, no polyester core.
**The note is not paperbag. The paper has a soft feel to it like it may even contain some kind of fiber. It looks like it was originally in the shape of a heart, and the point is gone. There was more, I can see two loops of the next line of text, but it's gone. and
Grandma's "Rebecca" is what is left. To my surprise, the note does not appear to have stained the dress like you would expect from acidic paper.
**The safety pin holding the note was brass, on the underside of the dress you can see the color, on the exposed part it has tarnished. Looks like it has been there a long time.
**The writing on the note is definitely fountain pen ink and not ball point. I know we learned to write with them in the 1960's in grade school, but it was an outdated technology at that point and not commonly used.I think the note could be dated to 1940-ish at the latest because of that?
So if we are talking about a person who was a grandma in the 1940s I think Rebecca must be turn of the century or earlier, does that seem right?
