As many of you know, I've had a pretty rough time over the last couple of years. And now I'm starting to recover and am ready to move on. Literally. My new partner and I have bought a new farm so we can have a fresh start together and we've just started work clearing the house out. The seller was born there, and the house was built by his parents. It's been empty for around ten years but left pretty much untouched. He was obviously very emotional about the place and was finding it difficult to even contemplate clearing out his mother's belongings, so I told him to just take what he wanted and leave the rest for me to clear.
It turns out his mother must have loved three things very, very much - flowers, the colour pink, and all things crochet!
Here is the kitchen. Bright pink, full of plastic flowers, and with a crochet granny square (well, hexagon) hanging up as a pot holder.
And here's the living room. Not pink, but full of lacey crochet work, old plates, cracked plastic vases full of sand and pink plastic flowers, the occasional jar of honey, and endless textiles tucked away in old chests and boxes and bags.
The first treasure I found was a bedspread, made of the same granny-hexagons as the pot-holder in the kitchen. I made off with this immediately and soon had it soaking in a tub of water and washing soda to remove a decade's worth of dust, and then washed it gently with several rinses and put it to dry. It's a little
shabby chic and needs a bit of repair in places, but I absolutely love it and it's currently adorning my bed and getting used to its new owner.
The next two treasures were a little different - a twenty euro note (which I think I should offer back to the seller...) and a little bundle of cabbage seed. I've sown half of this, in the off chance it's still viable. It would be good to get the strain of cabbage, probably perennial galega cabbage, that belongs to the new farm. The piece of crochet these two treasures are sitting on was far too damaged to be worth trying to salvage, but the very stained table runner at the back was actually intact, so I rescued it and it became my test piece to see how well I could remove old stains. More about that in a later post.
Here's a table runner that showed up.
And another one...
And a couple more bits and bobs...
And then these.
Which somehow seemed to sum up everything all at once.
Pink, crochet flowers, on plastic stems, presumably recycled from old plastic flowers.
They somehow seemed incredibly symbolic, so I brought them home with me to clean up and get ready to display in my new bedroom, when we finally get to the stage we can move in.
I've taken the crochet flower heads off their plastic stems and put them to soak with a bit of washing soda to see if I can clean them up a bit, or at least get the crap and dust off them.
All the old vases in the house were plastic and split, so I hit the used furniture place in Castelo Branco and came home with a perfect little glass vase for the princely sum of 50 cents. I've washed the dust and grime off it, and also off the plastic flower stems, and trimmed the stems to a more appropriate size.
One final photo for now. Right at the bottom of the last old chest of textiles that I cleared was a glass perfume bottle, which still smelled of perfume, and this photo. I'm guessing I've come face to face with the creator of those pink crochet flowers!
More to follow.