Wednesday 22 August 2012

Today I am mostly making...

...hankies:



Made from a piece of material that I once bought to make a voile thingy for the dining room window. I bought this material in the days before...

a) ...children

b)...the nation realised that stencilling a bathroom wall, having a bowl of pebbles with a wee-like dribble on wooden decking and calling it a 'water feature', hanging silly bits of almost see-through material called 'voiles' in front of your windows and generally any of the ideas that came from the 1990s tv programme "Changing Rooms" were naff and pointless and probably a government-funded way of keeping frustrated stay-at-home women busy and off prescriptive anti-depressants. (Does anyone remember the episode where they stapled - yes stapled - the curtain to the wooden pelmet? Obviously no-one expected the couple to actually want to open or close their newly-hung curtains)

and

c) (following on from a) before I knew how much snot a child could produce and how far a snotty piece of tissue in the back pocket of a child's black pair of jeans will go when washed at 40 degrees in non-biological washing powder with twenty other once-black, but due to be dappled and fluffy forever, items.

So. There I was with this large (actually several large) pieces of material in the loft that looked not unlike door-sized hankies. And now after a quick scissor-and-machine treatment they are smaller and multiple and ready for the onslaught of winter viruses.

(btw. I could say that the variation in hanky sizing that you see in the photograph is purely a consequence of their rustic cultural origins. But actually what happened is that I got bored measuring them after a while and it's surprising how quickly a square can turn into a lopsided rectangle when you lose concentration hemming with a sewing machine.

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