Old and New

I bought a new book today: a book I have wanted since it was first published in 2005. And when Andy, a school technology teacher, gave me a  Christmas gift voucher, it seemed apt to spend it on a book celebrating handcraft.  Unearthing so many fabric treasures recently, has rekindled my interest in needlecrafts and re-use of old materials - sides-to-middled sheets, curtain-trousers, flanelette-sheet bloomers - but my mother didn't seem to be much of a decorative crafts needlewoman.  On Christmas Day I brought out one of the very few embroidered items I had found in her neglected hoard, and was delighted at her response to it. Wistful. Reflective. "I was twelve when I did that at school," she said of the tea cloth which my new book rests on.  They didn't call it Technology then: her class was simply Embroidery. 



Thrift to Fantasy by Rosemary McCleod
Home Textile Crafts of the 1930s-1950s

Published by Harper Collins