Net curtain research

I’ve had a good few days this week getting on with my research into net curtains. I haven’t been anywhere exciting, just collating some of the information I’ve already gleaned and putting it all into some sort of order. Not as easy as it sounds! I started by dividing my research on different curtains styles into decades, but realised that fashions in interiors don’t necessarily conform to ten year cycles, so I’m now using early, mid and late parts of the different centuries. In her very useful book ‘Curtains and drapes’ Jenny Gibbs uses different style periods to differentiate fashions, such as Neoclassicism, but uses ‘Battle of the styles’ to describe the late 19 century, which appears to be an accurate description! I have lots of pictorial sources which I’m organising by date, but doing that has made me realise that perhaps I should be putting styles together instead, and then seeing when, swags, for example, were popular. It is only by actually sorting out the information that you hit upon the best way of doing it. At least describing the changes in machine lace production is proving easier!