It has all looked perfectly lovely gorgeous this summer...
...but then the day arrives when I know that French Window Closing Day is fast approaching.
The light shifts, the colours mellow from warm to drab, everything dies back...it rains...the logs are in and suddenly cosy is what I want..
and I had an idea and it's all Lucy Boston's fault...
'In the early 1940s Lucy had already bought a very large old patchwork for use as a bedcover in the guest room. Lucy had bought another which is composed of small hexagon rosettes... "begun 1801" and completed "1803". This quilt was found to fit perfectly as a curtain for the one of the west windows, while the other quilt (off the guest room bed) turned out to be exactly the right size for a floor to ceiling curtain over the south French windows...'
Many years ago, when I had the little quilt shop above Bookhound's design showroom, someone came in with two hand-pieced quilts, English patchwork, hexagons over papers, lined but not quilted, and asked if we wanted them, because if not they would be going on the bonfire. It's hard to even begin to imagine anyone doing that so of course we re-homed them. They have graced sofas and beds various ever since but now spend their days folded up in the blanket box..until I saw Lucy Boston's door at Hemingford Grey that is.
What is the point of having these lovely things if they never see the light of day I thought.
Of course I chose the wettest day to wash the three metre square one, and after such a good line-drying summer too, but no matter, once I'd thought of it this couldn't wait. Bookhound was dispatched to buy a new curtain pole whilst I, channelling my inner Lucy, set too with ironing and repairs and machining on the curtain tape
It was a chance to look really closely at all the fabrics which I might not have done properly before...
and so many that I recognized from my own dressmaking adventures in the 1960s and 70s..
As I did the repairs (isn't this vintage Laura Ashley?) adding my stitches to those of the original maker, I hoped they weren't looking down with an exclamation of displeasure
and throwing hands up in horror that, having been spared the ignominy of the bonfire, to realise their life's work would now to be subjected to fading in the sunlight, wear and tear and more repair, and probably the occasional cat attack because Magnus loves a good fight with a curtain.
I would like to think they'd be delighted, because I am. This is certainly going to brighten the winter evenings...
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