Daffodils from the Seventies
My grandmother used to do a lot of embroidery, but quite often didn't finish making something from the embroidered cloth.
She died in 1991, age ninety-three.
The last time Amy, who is eighty-four, was over here to visit from her home in Barrow-in-Furness, she found some of this embroidery and made it into a cushion cover.
Now she's found some more, and is doing the same thing:
and here's a close-up of the embroidery:
Now it's a kind of double family treasure: embroidered in the nineteen-seventies by my tiny-and-clever grandmother Charlotte and hand-sewn into a cushion-cover by the lovely and supremely talented Amy.
A lot of embroidery was done to make tablecloths and I'm not an embroidered-tablecloth kind of person myself: these are more casual times, perhaps.
But I love it that this beautiful old embroidery's being recycled. By chance, when I saw textile designer Katrin Freitag the other day I saw some delightful cloth bags which she's been making from old embroidered tablecloths.
We hear of recycling all the time these days: this is a lovely form of it.
She died in 1991, age ninety-three.
The last time Amy, who is eighty-four, was over here to visit from her home in Barrow-in-Furness, she found some of this embroidery and made it into a cushion cover.
Now she's found some more, and is doing the same thing:
and here's a close-up of the embroidery:
Now it's a kind of double family treasure: embroidered in the nineteen-seventies by my tiny-and-clever grandmother Charlotte and hand-sewn into a cushion-cover by the lovely and supremely talented Amy.A lot of embroidery was done to make tablecloths and I'm not an embroidered-tablecloth kind of person myself: these are more casual times, perhaps.
But I love it that this beautiful old embroidery's being recycled. By chance, when I saw textile designer Katrin Freitag the other day I saw some delightful cloth bags which she's been making from old embroidered tablecloths.
We hear of recycling all the time these days: this is a lovely form of it.
posted by Daphne at 7:55 pm
3 Comments:
Daphne, these are absolutely lovely! Mrs. Rhymeswithplague's favorite colo(u)r is yellow, so I've become a sucker for anything yellow that's allso incredibly well-done, and these daffodils are both! And how wonderful that your grandmother did it!
All right, class, let's recite all together now: "I wander'd lonely as a cloud...."
As you might have guessed, I am not a fanatic about embroidery but my mother was an expert seamstress and craftswoman and I admire any form of creativity which both brightens the world and personalises design. It doesn't all have to happen in magazines and London. It's a shame that some of these patient crafts which mothers used to hand down to their daughters are now being lost in the Primark/M&S throwaway world of today.
Just gorgeous. What an awesome memory every time you see that pillow.
I'm a tea towel fanatic. I love them. I try to collect them when I travel. If I visit someone, I try to get them to give me one of theirs. I love using the tea towels and thinking about where they came from. My favorites are the ones Silverback's mum gave me.
Hmmmm I hear you're coming to America. You don't, by chance, have any old tea towels laying around do you? *g*
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