Back in France 2018

If it is August through December, most years it means I am back in France. 

The town looks the same, a couple new additions of stores or restaurants and a couple closures as well. Once you live in a place for any period of time, you begin to notice the repeats of parts of life, like openings or closures of shops, festivals or shows as well as other things that happen at a certain time each year.

Here in my area of France we have something called the Mirabelle Fest. All in celebration of a distinctive tasting little yellow plum. The fest ended last week, but the balloon launching start right after that. If the wind is right they fly over the apartment.

This year they have skirted my area, but they are fun to watch even from a distance. 

Our cathedral also gets into the act with a laser light show on selected evenings as well:

As for sewing, let the season begin! My little trusty Bernina was retrieved from a French friend who watches over it.

My friend volunteer at a second hand store for the poor. Certain things are not appropriate for the poor and are thrown out. Once such item she took home to give to me:

It is a curtain. The work”woman”ship is beautiful. Wonderful examples of white work, Battenberg lace and bobbin lace. It needs to become something. I am thinking shirt right now but who knows. I have washed it and it is now displayed in the apartment where I walk by it several times every day.  

But first, before I do any other sewing I have to make some Christmas ornaments. 

This year I am focusing on using up lace bits. I have a nice collection of religious metals and beads and due to a class I took in August in Huntsville Alabama with Gloria McKinnon,  I now have lots of silk ribbon and beads to play with. These are super hard to find in France.

So this was my sewing table last week as I sorted through what I brought with me to play with and hopefully augment with new stuff this year. 

What ever it is, I have to make 10 of them. If I choose to join the Martha Pullen Yahoo group’s exchange as well, I need an additional 5 or 6 made. Should I do that, they get something a little different.

Speaking of Gloria Mckinnon, if you have a chance to take a class from her, please do. In August we were making a memory book. She gave warning that she did not put everything in the kit that was needed. It was supposed to be our memories.  Also, on here projects, she uses vintage things she has found in her travels. From experience I know that it would be close to impossible to find enough of, say, a certain vintage doily 100 times to put in kits. Same with carved buttons. 

As luck would have it, there was a lot of sharing going around. One of the participants brought a little bag of lace goodies for everyone. Someone else had been busy on their embroidery machine making and then dying some lace motifs to hand out to everyone. 

Several of the ladies in my class had not brought doilies that we needed to make several of the pages. Gloria did not have them for sale either. It was my turn to share. I took them to my room and assigned a couple of doilies to them so that they could continue with the pages.

To show you the types of things we were doing, here are two of my pages

On the left bottom was one of the items in my goody bag. It was a beautiful linen handkerchief. The picture and frame were part of the kit as well as some of the laces. the other laces were from my stash. On the right the top looks like a doily but it is not. Instead it is rayon edging framed into a circle Some of the beads came with the kit, others were added. The three ladies was in the kit. The doily at the bottom came from Oxford England a couple months ago. I found 3 of them at a shop and it worked beautifully. The other 2 were given out and are now in use on someones pages.

Back to Christmas ornaments, 

They are coming along.