21/01/2010

My own hell - and a red eye



As I allowed myself lunch today, I dug out the Arnold text to see what she actually had written.
This is from Patterns of Fashion (ISBN 0-333-38284-6, page 3):
"[... ] the tailor is cutting out with a large pair of shears, the small scraps left over being thrown into the box under the table. By the late seventeenth century these scraps and larger pieces of cloth appropriated by the tailor as his perquisits were described as "cabbage". The term may have derived from the word "carbage". The Oxford English Dictionary shows that in 1648 Herrick used both "garbage" and "carbage" apparently for "shreds and patches used as padding". "Cabbage" in the sense of a tailor's perquisite is in use by the 1660s and thereafter is also used as a cant word for private theft. This definition is given in A Dictionary of the Vulgar Tounge printed in 1811: "Cabbage... Cloth, stuff or silk purloined by taylors from their employers which they deposit in a place called hell, or their eye; from the first, when taxed with their knavery, they equivocally swear that if they have taken any they may find it in hell; or alluding to the second, protest that what they have over and above is not more than they could put in their eye".

It turns out that I did use "cabbage" in the wrong sense, as I used the scraps to cut the collars.
However, reading on, I found that in the translation of Alcega's Libro de Geometria, pratica y traca, done in 1979 (published as Tailor's Pattern Book, ISBN 0-903585-31-6), the Spanish word "medios" is translated as "cabbage". The Alcega "medios" were exactly the "cabbages" that I used...

Above is my black hell (all silk, 3 different qualities), below is my red eye (acetate lining, as is the green behind).
Today I have started another black hell, also scraps of lining.


No comments: