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This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1862 Excerpt:...the warp silk, and the weft wool. Silk and cotton are also mixed together in a similar way. But the most curious mixture of silk is that with glass, which, by the art of the glass-blower, being drawn out as fine and almost as flexible as a hair, is afterwards woven with silken threads into what is called glass tissue, a glittering fabric, that is too costly for common use. Silk and velvet (cut and shaped in some one or other of the many devices that ever-changing fashion dictates) are also used for the making of ladies' bonnets. But the most interesting manufacture for this particular purpose, is that of the straw-plat. Who first invented straw bonnets we do not know, but it appears that in the early part of the seventeenth century, an English traveller in Italy reports that "delicate" hats of this kind were worn in that country both by men and women. They must have been long used there, as in the sixteenth century the platting of straw for bonnets was practised in France, whence poor Mary, Queen of Scots, endeavoured to introduce it into her own country as a suitable employment for girls and women. In England, straw-platting is a comparatively new art, not dating more than seventy or eighty years back. The straw used for platting is that of wheat. In England we grow wheat for bread, but in Tuscany they sow it simply for the straw; accordingly it is reaped while the ear is still soft and milky, the grain having previously been sown so close, as to cause it to spring up short, and thin in the straw; when cut, it is dried in the sun, stacked for a month, and then again spread out in the open air to bleach, under the united influence of sun, wind, and dew. As in haymaking, it is frequently turned during the bleaching. When sun, air, and moisture have...