mettes pottery

Late Christmas gifts...

My parents Christmas gift this year was two sturdy pillows for using when reading in bed. Well, that's not the hole truth... On Christmas evening I gave them their gifts. Inside their package was a book ( for my mother a biography and for my father a book about growing and eating tomatoes ) and a little plasticbag filled with foam chips and a little card with an explanation...




That's not how it should have been. No, of course there should have been two finished pillows size 90 cm by 50 cm and two white sheets for each of them. But you see, I am always surpriced, Christmas month is not really a month, it is just 3 weeks... did you know that... so, I guess I was late and the pillows was finished today not more than 4 hours ago... so this is really breaking news, and not just the historic crafts journal that you have tuned into.




I am not that crazy about soft floppy bedlinen. I like the stiff hotel kind of bedlinen, all shiny and cool with the folding marks still showing. Maybe I am just getting old... It seems I have never really payd that much attention to mattresses pillows and stuff like that... I am also very konservative since I really only like white bedlinen, maybe even with initials but that would probably crash severely with the rest of our lifestyle.




The rest of the day was used helping my mother mending some of her clothes, a bit of altering and putting new elastic in her overalls. The ones she practically lives in during the summer, when she gets up at 6 am and goes straight to the garden. You see she doesn't do any sewing, she can't knit, but she makes the best puff pastry in the world.

I started making my own clothes when I was 13. I basically learned it by following the same principle as reading a manual. I bougth Burda patterns. They had this great magazine for petites. I am 163 cm and the patterns were for 160 cm but they had very small sizes and I was rather skinny. I just blindly followed every single instruktion without having any clue about the big picture. Sometimes it ended happily and other times, well...

My grandmother was very good on sewing and helped me a bit, but I wasn't really keen about getting help. I thougt it slowed down the process way too much. I wasn't so patient back then. My father also helped me a bit. I especially remember that time when I had just cut all the pieces for a pair of pastel yellow pants with big pockets, only to realize that I had cut the pocket out from the one of the pieces for the legs. I could get very hysteric and even cry. my mother was rather frustrated not knowing how she could help me and usually asked my father to try help. I don't quite remember how he solved the particular situation, but he did and he was always very good in trying to make me calm down and find the solution myself. Writing this I see that is in fact a pattern I have seen in my adult life... Not that I am proud of it. But what the heck, we all stay as kids to our parents, no matter how old we get.