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Showing posts with the label handkerchiefs

Untold Stories

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Over the years and many moves later, I’m cleaning out my current master closet.   It is a long narrow closet with shelves and more room than I’m used to having.   That is where the ‘family boxes’ were stored when we moved to this house.   Those boxes have not been opened for a number of years for one reason or another.   Now I have time,   a vintage etsy store and not many family members who are interested in the contents.   http://www.lindabrittdesign.blogspot.com/2012_11_01_archive.html Last month I came across the box of ladies handkerchiefs.   This week I opened a box of crocheted and knitted children’s clothes.   Not many items, but enough to revive the stories in my memory.    My mother had a pen-pal in England and they shared letters, stories and sent gifts.   This brown hand-knitted dress was one of those gifts for me as a little girl.   The pen-pal in England was a woman, a wife, a mother who had twin boys and I wonder what my mother sent to them.   I also wonde

Finding Treasure in Handkerchiefs

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Recently I decided to clean out the master bedroom closet.   It is a long narrow walk in closet and the coldest place in the house in the winter.   It was now or wait until spring.   I began with the usual – going through the hanging clothes and then the shoes and last the boxes that never got unpacked from the last move.   That was when the fun began!   When I opened a small box of handkerchiefs I could almost smell the lilac fragrance my grandmother was so found of.   There was a stack of my mother’s and grandmother’s beautiful handkerchiefs I had forgotten about.   Both women loved the femininity of the embroidery and lace on batiste and fine linen fabric.   They never went anywhere without a clean ironed square in their purses.     Finding those handkerchiefs got me to thinking about handkerchiefs in general and I did a little research.   It seems that King Richard II of England , who reigned from 1377 to 1399, was responsible for the original squares of fabric for nose