Stamps That Make You Look Twice

Ms. Austen was certainly ahead of her time ......

Partime, what made me look twice at your Malta stamp was that the "H" in 'Farthing' was obscured by the cancellation .....

I better lay off using Ronsonol for a while....
Dan

Going for the goodies.

Cheers,

/s/ ikeyPikey

Q/ Any idea what this woman is doing, to what, and with what?

Cheers,

/s/ ikeyPikey

It looks like some type of loom work / embroidery with the little wound thread shuttles or hand-bobbins but it also looks like some type of archaic typewriter too? Not sure?

It is a SC 1154. The caption reads: "Bobbin Lace Maker from Vadstena."

Dan

definitely Lace making.

No, no... Scott is wrong. She's obviously making a place mat out of Q-Tips.

Don't they know anything?



-IBFS

Got a definitive answer from a friend, to wit:

===

Actually I do happen to know what she is doing. She is making Bobbin Lace.

The base that she is working on with that cylinder across the top of it is a Bobbin Lace pillow. The roller is where you attach the pricking (that paper attached to it) the pricking is the pattern. It's a series of grids with holes "pricked" into it to show where pins are placed as you wind the threads around them, following a road map of sorts. That roller is for making lace edgings or long borders of a repeated pattern or series of patterns.

All those things hanging of it and what she is holding in her hands are the bobbins. They are typically made out of turned wood, though you will find other materials, such and plastics and metal. But wood is the most common material.

The bobbins hold individual threads wound onto each bobbin and then are twisted and move from right to left and back again in a specific order to make the twists and turns in the lace.

Do you remember those painting of european lords and ladies with all the lace pouring from the sleeves and necklines of their clothes? That was bobbin lace. It was first made by men (as was knitting and weaving, but they gave it up with the industrialization of those skills and they were relegated to "women's work"... But back in the day whole families would make bobbin lace. In some places they would do it in buildings and with the lack of electricity they would have lamps and candles burning near bowls of water and mirrors to reflect the light around the rooms so they could see what they were doing.

I used to belong to the Lace Guild in Atlanta Georgia and I learned how to make bobbin lace from an old woman from England... she was a real delight to learn from and her husband made wooden bobbins, both the plain ones for her classes and the fancy ones from exotic woods for folks who wanted them. I have several extremely nice bobbins that he made for me.

And I have a bobbin pillow a lot like the gal in the stamps. Someone from the guild gave me the plans to the pillow and I sent them to my Dad and he made it for me.

Now that'll learn ya to ask me if I know what something is won't it? ;-)

===

Cheers,

/s/ ikeyPikey

IBFS: I thought they were feathers. That was the moment when I knew that I had no idea ...

Those are some HUGE Q-tips!!

After some puzzling, I decided that this was an illustration of Quantum Entanglement but, according to the Great White Wiki In The Sky, this was not amongst Mr Dirac's interests.

He worked on positron/electron matter/anti-matter stuff, but my feeble grasp of these subjects does not allow me to grasp if these are the subject of the artwork, either.

Thanks to IBFS, however, I now realize that these are the complementary paths taken, as viewed from the inside of the brain, of two Q-tips.

Cheers,

/s/ ikeyPikey

A very Greeky Turk or a very Turky Greek?

Funny how two cultures can take so much from each other or, at least, so closely mirror each others choices, and deny, deny, deny.

Yes, thanks, I recognize the language on the stamp ;)

Cheers,

/s/ ikeyPikey

See? What would ya all do without me?

And being powerfully educated in the area of a seldom known science of Physics known only to me as Mindography (the geometric and atomic mapping of the waves of inner brain imaginative thinking) I can conclusively point out that two huge Q-Tips, interpreted from a doodle on the inside cover of one of Paul Dirac's childhood books, was the source for the inspiration of the image on the Dirac Swedish stamp from above.


-IBFS

Looks like Crazy Horse is wearing horse blinds!

Hey, COOL, the very Greeky Turk or very Turky Greek (see stamp, above) was on a postcard, too!

I guess that makes him a Turky Greek.

Dude gets around ... but what's with the pompoms?

Cheers,

/s/ ikeyPikey