Folding cloth

From time to time, I notice the mysterious ways of folding cloth, with an early example to be found at reference 1.

So the other morning, I was very struck by the pattern made by the trim along the edge of our eiderdown, particularly when one moved it about slightly by moving one's toes about slightly.

As it happened, on opening up gmail a little later, there was a piece in the Kurzweil newsletter about the people at reference 2, also interested in the patterns you can get in cloth and other materials, in their case computer generated. So it is not just me.

The eiderdown pattern is made very simply, as can be seen in the foreground of the snap, by taking a tuck in the strip of cloth, used to trim the edges of the quilted rectangle, of a quarter inch or so every inch or so.

Digressing, the people at reference 4 make eiderdown look ridiculously expensive. Just imagine spending your working day picking bits of dead twigs and dead leaves out of the fluff taken out of ducks' nests.

So given that our eiderdown came to us via the Saturday Telegraph, from which a good proportion of the special offers to readers are pretty tatty (although this particular eiderdown has served very well), I was not surprised to find that it was not an actual eiderdown at all, merely eiderdown like, from the people in Fife at reference 5. That said, it was natural feather, without any further qualification that I could find, so I was unable to find our eiderdown (aka quilt) on today's website. Was it goose, Hungarian or otherwise? Was is duck? Was it ecological duck? Was it down or was it feather? Could one decently say that no ducks or geese had been harmed during the production of this quilt?

Did the sort of middle class people that George Orwell wrote about, at the time our parents were growing up, always call their quilts eiderdowns in order to make them sound posher and more expensive than they really were?  So that eiderdown has come down to me as a word for quilt, without any particular connotations or associations at all.

Reference 1: https://psmv2.blogspot.com/2015/09/abstract-expressionism.html.

Reference 2: https://www.zeitguised.com/.

Reference 3: https://www.zeitguised.com/neuralgroove#neuralgroove-1.

Reference 4: https://www.downduvet.co.uk/eiderdown.html.

Reference 5: http://www.euroquilt.co.uk/.