RAGS AND RICHES

 

 It's still several weeks away, but I am getting great interest in our forthcoming RAG MARKET, May 19th, Sunday here in Bradford on Avon.  In addition to a few top regular dealers, I have gathered a large number of private people who are down-sizing and retiring and seem to have little mountains of surplus belongings they want to get rid of (and make a little profit).    I am often told sad stories by these ladies who have inherited fine linen, lace and other vintage textiles, as well as having their own collections from holidays abroad and their business careers in journalism and decoration.  Their children do not want them and the Auction Houses are not interested in small lots.  They are all old colleagues and friends of mine and I know they have very good taste and look after their belongings carefully, so the results should be most interesting and useful and maybe rather special!  One seller is bringing stuff from Westminster Abbey, where she has been living with her clerical husband and now retiring and has lots of good household stuff from numerous rambling rectories!  Three others are cloth pattern designers and will bring sample remnants and rolls which have probably never been on the market.   This will be a chance for young couples setting up home, people furnishing holiday homes and property lets to find good clean household stuff: linen, blankets, towels, etc. and sewing ladies will find haberdashery and samples ideal for craft work and original creations. I myself am turning out ten drawers of threads, buttons, tapes and ribbons, cutting scissors and wheels, cutting mats, etc. ideal for home workshops.

  If you are wanting large secondhand curtains, I will have about 10 pairs, long and beautiful, some from French chateaux  and several from a 5th Avenue, US. appartment, originally extremely expensive designer stuff now knocked down to fractional prices to clear!  Also some 18C. Toile de Jouy much reduced.  There are several curtains and rolls of Colefax materials and lots of fringes and trimmings from workshops.  Do bring the measurements of your windows and we will try and furnish you.   You may know I am retiring and am now anxious to clear the decks!   Email me  dbaer@onetel.com.  for all info.   Fair details are on my Blog  elizabethbaertextiles.blogspot.com. under post STOP PRESS FUTURE FAIRS

ARE YOU BEING SERVED?

Mary Portas, the doyen of shoppers with a weekly column in Telegraph weekend magazine really gives you the lowdown on stores and shops and would not be that impressed by the odd Brocantes that I still visit. She would say that the average one is no more than a shed with a few tired looking articles scattered around in no special order, the iron work is rusty, the woodwork is wormy and the old textiles are crumpled and unwashed and the proprietor is unenthusiastic about his stock|. But I have to say that this is the real attraction for me, a 'chineur' par excellence, as rooting through the rubbish and discarded items, there is always the chance of a 'find' and digging deep is part of the fun. It takes time and patience, but I have found some very interesting and original things in the old barns, lean-to's, and even behind the sheds in the untidy gardens. Wood -worm in the legs of furniture are a liability and expensive to replace - ironwork that is rusty can be the work of gypsies who make game hooks and butchers accessories in the same way as the originals but are 'too good' and perfect to have had any use, linen and curtains need very close inspection in the light as they can have faulty seams, old patches or be so thin as to be useless. On the other hand I have bought wonderful passementerie from the local chateau, faded but still beautiful, old brass fittings of a quality not available over here, and interesting tools that have a good local history, table knives with bone handles, worn but nostalgic servants' aprons in indigo linen with huge pockets and long strings, all deemed fairly obsolete by the brocanteurs and sold very cheaply.

Rub-a-dub-dub

When I was in Brittany, a long time ago, I bought from an elderly brocante dealer, some very rough sheets in hemp which were top of my shopping list - they are simply wonderful in colour and texture, very porridgey, for upholstery and backing rustic cushions. She said she could only wash one at a time in the big washer at the laundrette because they were so heavy when wet and I have found the same. I asked her how the women managed to wash in the old days before the war and machines, and she told me that her mother had been a washerwoman for 17 years. If you look at the woman on the right, you will see she is kneeling on a box-like stool which kept her clean and dry and with a place for the bars of Marseille soap. I was imagining an older lady kneeling for hours with red hands from the cold, cold water, the endless rubbing and wringing and then pushing a heavy wheelbarrow, full of wet clothes and linen somewhere to dry - no room at the 'lavoir'  literally 'the washplace'.  You can see one of the special wheelbarrows which carried the heavy load and kept it out of the dirty, dusty roads. I often used to buy these barrows in my art populair buying days,  sometimes painted a lovely French bluey-green and they made delightful garden accessories. My friend told me her mother prefered to scrub all the clothes with a brush but others favoured a woooden bat which was used to smack the soapy water through the cloth and carry away the dirt - the lavoirs are now often listed as historic buildings and are enticing with mirror like reflections but they also remind me of the hard times and unremitting toil some of the women suffered in the past;  washing heaps of heavy linen on a cold winter's day must have been very hard work for hands, arms and backs.

FRENCH GENERAL, HOLLYWOOD

Here is a lovely creation by my friend Kaari, Hollywood, full of clever ideas for keeping your sewing oddments and notions - she put it on the web to tell us about her sewing book HOME SEWN BOOK and has used bits and pieces from her own stock (and mine) to make this pretty and useful 'housewife' or 'hussif'. You can see initial name tapes from France, that she bought from me 5 years ago! pearl buttons, little pockets of old furnishing cottons, labels from her own STATIONERY & LABELS booklet, and scraps of ticking material; I hope it may inspire others to use up some of their favourite scraps. She has changed her address to an old warehouse in Hollywood recently and I follow her blog with great interest as she is a really clever dealer with lots of innovative ideas and has a huge following. She has just taken a large party of fans to a chateau in France, for a week of textile talks and demo's, and visits to local markets. Her blog is called The Warp and the Weft.

A Palampore for all Seasons

I have been learning new names for old textiles, reading up about the wonderful hangings and shawls known as Palampores, originally designed and painted chintz, created on the Coromandel Coast of India - they owe much to other Eastern lands -Persia, Siam and China, because they were exported to Europe from the 16th C. and new patterns and designs were in great demand for the following centuries. They were often based on Persian flowered fabrics, and the Tree of Life features often with fruit, flowers, animals, birds and insects. They were exported to Europe by the East India Companies along the trade routes and reached ports in France, Holland and England, where they were received with great enthusiasm by the fashionable and rich. In fact they had such a bad effect on European trade that they were banned for a time with very severe penalties, which made them all the more desirable! I went to a stunning exhibition of these rarities at Port Louis in Brittany several years ago, and thought it the most exciting display of textiles I had ever seen.   They are now extremely valuable and make news at the top London auction houses.More in another Post, while I get my breath back!

MRS.MONRO AND HER CHINTZES

  Her trade name really was Mrs.Monro and her beautiful chintzes were famous before the last war.  She was a skilled decorator and had a great liking for extremely pretty decorations, fine china, needlework and  charming needlework boxes, tea caddies and other choice collectors items.  I was living nearby in an old mews cottage and pushing a pram, and I used to stop outside her window to admire her display - I think I really appreciated the constantly changing  little scene and it struck me then how important composition and arrangement were to catch the eye and make the buyer stop.   Mrs. Monro was one of the first interior designer of repute, and had a world-wide business,  took her stuffs to the U.S., had many socialite hostess clients over there and designed interiors for ocean liners, embassies, banks, and many other clients worldwide. She had good publicity in magazines like The Tatler, when it was not very usual for ladies of gentle birth to indulge in trade!  Her daughter, Jean Monro, has continued the business.

A composition by Mrs Monro, English decorated porcelain and lustre-ware, tea cups, plates, slop bowls and spill vases, with fresh garden flowers on a Regency set of shelves.  Fine trellis pattern wallpaper.

  Her patterns were often based on English garden flowers and old prints that she discovered in her clients' period houses;  they were light and gracious and were much used for loose covers on sofas and chairs, especially in the little bijou houses and cottages that were hidden behind the busy shops and stores in  the Brompton Road.

    My pram-pushing route took me past Harrods on one side and a row of very grand antique shops on the other:  Pratts, with fireplace impedimenta, where I admired the Georgian grates and the elegant fenders and guards in Gothic, Adam and Victorian designs, also rare Paktong fire dogs;   Coopers the grocers, came further along and  I  studied the Crane Galleries who had fantastic impressionist paintings worth many thousands (now worth millions, of course) I got to know the names of Dufy,  Picasso and many others and I returned to my modest mews inspired with a love of antiques and beautiful things, a feeling I still have to this day.  Little did I know that one day I would be selling small Folk Art objects to Andreas Calman, owner of the Crane Gallery twenty years later!

My own small collection of lustreware, an old tea-set bought in Wales where it often decorated kitchen dressers, and a collection of mugs on top from my cousin's Portmerion Pottery.(modern)

 At the other end of the scale, and the Brompton Road, where it became Knightsbridge Green, there was a quaint little haberdashery shop run by two antique looking ladies.  Their tiny window was stuffed with buttons and sewing notions, with adverts for 'invisible mending',  'ladders in silk stockings repaired', 'name tapes to order', and they were a relic of the time when the owners of the big houses near Hyde Park all employed ladies maids, housekeepers and housemaids whose job it was to repair and maintain all the linen and clothes of their employers.  I was already doing a lot of 'make do and mend 'as it was in the late 40s when everything was on coupons and I then began my hobby of sewing and making for my family.  The little old ladies became very friendly and so helpful, but I had no silk stockings to my name, and my underwear was made of parachute nylon!

INITIAL SUCCESS

If you look at any mixed collection of old French clothes and linen, you will almost always find that a great many are decorated with initials - and I use the word seriously because the letters are usually beautifully neat, often in bright red cotton and range from simple cross stitch to quite elaborate affairs, sometimes decorated with scrolls, flowers and fruit. The patterns for these designs were printed in the women's magazines of the late 19c. every month, and the complete alphabet was often drawn life-size on the back page for housewives to copy. The linen and clothes for the dowry were hugely important to every girl; Mother would start it as soon as a little girl was born and would add to the collection until her marriage - the linen cupboard would be part of the marriage contract and much might depend on its size and value - a rich dowry might secure a good marriage to a man with goods and land and the girl could look forward to a life of comparative comfort and ease, whereas a poor dowry might lead her to a life of drudgery and physical hard work with incessant child-bearing and no domestic help with the washing, water carrying and other menial tasks. Very, very small cross stitch initials in the corners of towels, napkins and other fine linen cloths denote an early date in 19c. the florid ones belong to the end of the century - satin stitch in white on good linen are usually turn of the 19c. and plain inch-high red cross stitch were common on peasant rough linen and hemp sheets of about the same date. Those of the 20th c. are obviously Art Deco style, angular and in geometric frames, sometimes quite difficult to decifer - some are quite impossible; they were produced as 'false' initials and crest-like decorations by the big department stores for brides who could neither do the embroidery themselves or could not afford or wait for the fine work of the convent nuns who produced some of the best work. The very best initials were infilled with regular lines of tiny French knots, beyond the skill of most amateur needlewomen, and the flowers and ornamental patterns are smooth and perfect in a variety of stitches, with hidden knots and thread endings.

STOP PRESS FUTURE FAIRS

This is the final list of Textile Fairs for this year 2013.  You will be very welcome at all these Fairs which are organised for textile enthusiasts,   The dealers are all well-known in their respective fields and you will be offered high quality goods at reasonable prices.

Wed. April 10th    Meeting House Arts Centre, Ilminster, TA19 OAN, 9.30am.-4pm.
Wed.May 15th      Deans Court, Wimborne, BH21 1EE, 10am.-4pm. Cafe. £5 entry.*
Sun.May 19th.      Masonic Hall and Wine Vaults at 29 Church St., Bradford on Avon,
                               BA15 1LN, 9am.-3pm. RAG MARKET  Trade/private sellers.
Thurs.July 18th      Brownsword Hall, Poundbury, Dorset, DT1 3GN. 9am.-4pm,
Sat..Sept. 14th       Masonic Hall, Church St. Bradford on Avon, BA15 1LN,
                             10 am.-4pm.
Thurs.Oct.10th       Meeting House Arts Centre, Ilminster, TA.19 OAN, 9.30am - 4pm.

    All T.forT. Fairs are free entry except*.  Good refreshments on site or nearby. 

For updates, email your full address details to Linda Clift at   textile@lindaclift.co.uk.

My Rag Market - Shop till you drop! -  E. Baer.

or Caroline Bushell at   tygandco@btinternet.com