Hydrangea season

"It is strange how deeply colours seem to penetrate one, like scent"
George Elliot, Middlemarch

I still can't do anything craft-related, so I started reading Middlemarch: 900 pages of romance and intrigue in the Victorian Age. I'm giving my arms some more rest, so it will be a while before I can show progress of my crocheted throw :-)

It's hydrangea season in my garden now, a great reason to combine lilac, green and blue!

Vintage embroidered whitework border

This is one of the "scraps" I bought at Brocante aan de Yssel a few weeks ago. (I tried to take pictures of the other pieces as well, but those images didn't turn out the way I wanted too :-) It's a long strip of whitework embroidery, maybe cut off from a night dress or something. I saw some aprons with this type of embroidery too. I don't know what time frame this is from, but it would be a really cute border on a nightgown like this.

Seven centuries of lace, Maria Margaret Pollen, 1908

Image from Seven centuries of Lace, by Maria Margaret Pollen

The past few weeks, my attention has been drawn by lace of all sorts... It started at the Brocante and Antiques Fair in Deventer, where I bought some gorgeous scraps of lace (no pictures yet, it takes time with an analog camera.... Then, Racaire wrote about the blog Italian Needlework, which is a must-read for anyone interested in historical needlework.

And now, I found this wonderful on-line book Seven centuries of Lace, by Maria Margaret Pollen (1908). You can download or browse it for free here.

The 17th century Italian towels above are really nice, and macrame is such a fun thing to do :-)

Embroidering a tablecloth in a perfect world

Image via the New York Public Library Digital Archive

In a perfect world, embroidering a large tablecloth would probably look like this (notice the serene smile on her face...). In the real world ... argghll... I keep having problems with managing a piece of fabric of 110 *300 cm. That's why I still haven't done more embroidery on my linen tablecloth... I hope that one day, I''ll have the perfect frame so I can move on!

ps: the flower border she's embroidering looks very cute!