For the Love of Textiles

This blog 'For the Love of Textiles' is no longer active on Blogger. You can now follow it at WordPress. Go to This Link to get there. and follow it when you are a TextileLover too! Hope to see you there. With love from Jan

After the purchase of the linen sheets (see previous post) there was time for more searching in the cabinets and drawers at the Retro department of Emmaüs. I found a beautiful piece of linen embroided with two bouquets of summer-flowers. I didn't had a close look at it, but it looked so fresh and bright. It was almost for nothing (about € 2,-), so it ended up at the pile to be taken home before leaving this 'Alladin's Cave of Textile Treasures". And this is the piece. It is a rectangle of white linen cloth and on both sides are bouquets of flowers embroided in different kind of stitches.  Red poppies, blue cornflowers, white daisies, ears of corn, green leaves. At least that is what you see at first. But after a closer look (and a very clever look of my husband Jos) suddely you see that he piece isn’t finished. And that both bouquets are very different. White daisies on one side and strange yellow ones on the other side. The poppies aren’t finished...

There is something nice about sheets. During our last summerholidays in the south of France I was on the hunt. On the hunt for textiles and esp. linen sheets. They are hard to get but they can be found when you are lucky at Emmaüs. And I was lucky at Emmaüs Courthézon . It was a very sunny and warm saturdaymoring. The retro department was only open that day. A charming older lady was waiting in what would be a cave full of textile treasures. I was expecting a full house but we were there alone for the first hour. And there they were. Sheets.  A closet full of sheets and a table with a big pile. Amazed I was seeing this wall full of amazing sheets. And for very reasonable prices. Embroided, with broderie, plain, thick and thin and more. The feel of linen is so different from cotton. I love to wear a linen shirt on a summer's day. Yes, you ...

This is not a blogpost about textiles, but about a beautiful flowerbook I bought last week in Rome. On the last day we visited the bookstore La Feltrinelli. Ofcourse most books there are in the Italian language. But downstairs at the art section a book a book stared at me. With an intriguing title: Florilegio (Anthlogy) i fiori, il tempo, la vita (flowers, time, life) By Makoto Azuma (florist) and Shunsuke Shiinoki (photographer) I opened it just one time and there it was: a page full of colour, almost toxic. I was intrigued right away. So I bought it to take home.  The book contains 4 chapters:                          1.   The stage of birth 2. The stage of blossoming 3 . The stage of Maturity 4 . The stage of silence It might also be seen as all stages we go through in our life as human being. We are born, we grow up, we become older and at the end silence...