Eat Your Tea-Time Treats Off This...!

Just before we did that last craft fair, my brother and his lovely family went over to the other side of the country to see my Mum. She sent back with him a bag of old linen for me (she knows me SO well!)
As I opened it - that reassuring fragrance of clean, ironed, aged fabric was released. I glimpsed the colours and shapes of childhood Sunday teas and Easter lunches with Grandparents.
The gorgeous memory of Granny's dark chocolate and ginger cake - an almost black sponge with a fresh cream and crystalised-ginger-chunks-in-apricot-jam filling and a dusting of icing sugar on top came flooding back!

Here are some photos of part of my history:

Out of the bag I pulled lovingly starched, pressed and folded white lace tablecloths and napkins, a pale blue and berries striped cotton tea cloth that looks French somehow... and two beautiful colourful, heavily embroidered everyday cloths on heavy floppy linen.

There are umpteen little lace tray doilies and a large cut-work circular tablecloth with six napkins and even four delightful linen hand towels - the kind you would only put out when you had visitors coming - and you lived in the nineteen-twenties - they might be my great grandmother's...

I adore the detail in the hand stitching -  and can't help picturing the practical, skilled women's hands that made these pieces -