It really can seem quite odd, how life – or ones mind – seems to move through clusters of coincidence, most of them very tiny.
And so I have spent a fair portion of time recently writing & thinking about 1950s home dress making, sewing, fashions, petticoats & laundry, bumping into unexpected connections, recovering memories which seemed long forgotten or uncertain.
On Friday I read The Ebony Hand, a short story by Rose Tremaine, a tender, elegiac evocation of life in 1950s Norfolk. Ordinary, simple people with complex internal lives & emotions; love, pain, madness & coping.
A plain spinster aunt who takes in her half-orphaned abandoned niece and manages to get to the point where ‘My efforts to love Nicolina were succeeding fairly well.’
Nicolina however discovers sex to the soundtrack of Paul Anka playing on the radiogram, with predictable results.
The aunt loses her job when the old fashioned draper shop where she has served for twenty years finally closes down. She thinks about all the familiar objects which she will not see again.
Including ric rac
And there I was, lost again in my own memories of sewing & dressmaking, this time as a small girl having to endure the fitting of a dress my mother was making for me.
Ric rac, which the OED defines as a decorative zigzag braid, though I would call it curved – like a sine curve in fact. Nobody knows how it got its name.
A virtually compulsory form of decoration on a little girl’s dress in the 1950s, it seems to be inspired by a kind of edging used in crochet patterns & became commercially available in the USA at the end of the C19th.
It certainly saved an awful lot of work with the crochet hook – needed only a single line of machine stitching to hold it in place as either surface pattern or decorative edging.
I hadn’t thought of ric rac for years, nor, I think, seen it. Though I expect that, now I have remembered, I shall start seeing it on little girls dresses everywhere – it seems to fit quite well with current fashions.
