Is there anybody out there who collects old linen, needlework, books about it and stuff like that? It's nearly the only thing I collect seriously - I've got a whole cupboard with old bed linen, hand made fabric and table clothes and stuff like that. ..and to reveal another "secret" that even my best friends around here don't know: I even do needlework and sew my own clothes. (Some of the girls react funny, if I say "I do needlework", seems to be not very up-to-date for a "modern girl")

i do needlework too, isabel! and i get it framed and hung in my living room too!! love it--great stress reliever.... i'll see what kind of websites i can find and post them here.

Great! *Smile*

Needleworker here, too. (A Hemming would have to be, No?!). However, in this climate even the stuff you use regularly gets mildew stains on it and they cannot be removed. Most discouraging considering that some of it was dont by my Grandmother and it is all I have from her!

have you tried soaking it in hot water with clorox II and dove dish detergent? just let it soak and soak. (put equal amounts of clorox ii and dove in a sinkful or clean bucket full of hot water). this generally removes most stains from my cross stitch pieces. just make sure you rinse well in cold water. you can take it to a drycleaners to get it sealed just like a wedding dress. this should help prevent mildew probs.

Thanks, I'll try that. I have tried about everything else but scissors to be rid of the little orange spots...!

little orange spots? could they be rust?

No, it is our brand of mildew out here on linens (all stored in acid-free tissue and in cardboard boxes.) Some in ziplocks also mildewed. Never seems to get the green or black kind like the walls and ceilings do, but the orange is something we have all had to fight. I am sure it is coloration from iron salts involved somewhere in there, so I should us oxyllic acid to get rid of them, I imagine. Now aren't you happy you do not live on the windward side of a tropical island?!.

have seen orange mildew in the baths (esp. right after we bought the house)...wouldn't the acid destroy the delicate fabrics?

I am afraid it will, thus never tried anything too extreme - like regular Chlorox. Will give a your suggestion a try, though. They are not usable as they are, so I might as well try...will let you know of my success. (Don't tell me about baths. Yuck! You can watch it grow in there!)

Looms Ebay Tapestry Index Ebay Textiles Index maybe this will get you started, isabel.... and anybody find any other links, please post them!!

one too many spaces inbetween the links, sorry about that. marcia, DO NOT use chlorox bleach!! oh, and use clorox ii powder, not liquid. once dry, you can iron (from the back) to lose any wrinkles, don't press too hard or you'll flatten the stitches. oh, and if you have needlepoint or cross stitched pieces, they'll need to be stretched to maintain their shape. you can use foam board and rustless pins available at crafts stores and, quite possibly, walmart.

Yes, thanks for the information. I knew about the other pinning for form. I always ironed my needlework on towels so the stitches had some place to sink into. OK, Chlorox II powder...!

Maybe I should look into one of my old householdbooks if I could find something for the mildew-problem, Marcia. But be careful with your old linens, please!!! I had mildew-stains on old linen, too, but I got them out with normal bleach. After washing them twice and bleaching in the sun, they looked brand new. It were old pillow-cases with real bobbin-lace! ...and they were ment to be thrown away, got them out of a trash-bin!! Seems to be a special-Hawaian-mildew-species...

Bleach: In the olden days, our grandmothers used oxygen to bleach. They spread their linens - still wet - on community lawns (many street addresses like Bleiche or An der Bleiche still refer to the location of this place) on sunny days. The photosynthesis of the gras beneath makes gras "exhale" oxygen, which bleached the sheets. Hmh, I wonder if that might help.

Yes, it certainly does help. During the WW2 period I heard that was how women got their laundry anything like white during rationing and scarcity of materials (of course I would know nothing about this personally...) Thanks for the sage reminder.

Isabel, I do think we have special inflictions put upon us for the privilege of living in Hawaii, lest we get too overbearing about it. I am happy you got your linens (with bobbin lace!)pristine again. I shall go very slowly in my efforts to get the orange spots out. And, thank you for your time and kind thoughts. As soon as the next dry spell hits, I shall try and let you know of my success.

yep, sun-bleaching is the natural way!

Is that why wolves like to roll in the gras?

yup, and it's a good way to get that rump and back scratched when yer too fat to do it yourself!!

(*grin* there is no such thing as a fat wolf!)

Hi Marcia! Didn't find much about mildew yet. There's something about using soda in old times, maybe this would help...or hydrogen peroxide, but this might be very aggressive, too."Das Reich der Hausfrau" says, if you use chlorine, you should rinse the linen very carefully afterwards or take anti-chlorine (what ever this might be...) to neutralize it.

Aloha Isabel! I have an interesting re-print of an old book of household formulas, and it includes remedies for horse colic and I don't know what all. I should check in there and see what it suggests. Lemon juice has been used for bleaching hair. Wonder if it would also work on linen?!

Since chlorine in bleach is an alkalai, I wonder if white vinegar might be a good acid to use...

white vinegar and baking soda works wonders on all sorts of things!

Oh good! Thanks for the input. Somewhere in the back of my mind hiding amongst the debris, I vaguely remembered something like that.

Today I was lucky! Found a little linen pillow-case with richelieu-needlework for just 5 marks (about $ 2.5)at the fleamarket! Normally you would pay loads of money for something like this. Some of the little "bridges" are broken, but I guess I can repair them. It's sooo lovely! I should get a new e-mail adress, so I can show you some stuff! Maybe I could get an account at the spring? Who to ask?

Isabel, instead of clogging up valuable space on Spring's hard drive, go to hotmail or yahoo for their free service. It would be really nice to have you with a mailable address so we could get to know you better...*smile*

I am Jealous of your finds at yout "flea" markets. The ones here come with real fleas and not much else to write home about!

that's why we go to garage sales. today, we went to a year-long flea market and i found some barbies but they were from the 80's. nothing to write home about there either! didn't see any linens except for a couple dirty old quilts that weren't exciting in the least.

Found my Henley's Formulas (Originally published in 1907). For bleaching linen: "Mix common bleaching powder in the proportion of 1 pound to a gallon of water. Stir occasionally for 3 days and pour it off clear. Then make a lye of 1 pound of soda to 1 gallon of boiling water in which soak the linen for 12 hours, and boil it half an hour; next soak it in the bleaching liquor, made as abocve; and lastly wash it in the usual manner. Discoloured linen or muslin may be restored by putting a portion of bleaching liquor into the tub wherein the articles are soaking." "Bleaching solution (aluminum hyperchloride) is made by adding to a clear solution of lime chloride a solution of aluminum sulphate." I'll bet you cannot even get this stuff anymore at the store - unless you are a chemistry professor! You do not want to know how involved he makes bleaching linen and other vegetable fibers with hydrogen peroxide, but it involves reeling vats and piling the fabric on carriages and acidulating them later. This book is amazing. It has formulae for electroplating and just about anything else you ever wanted to know!

I've never been to the U.S., not to speak of Hawaii!, but maybe european fleemarkets have more really old stuff to sell (???). The ones I visit in Germany are also mostly new stuff, many many clothes and not very interesting. Mostly I find just one thing, like the little pillow-case, and mostly I don't get up early enough to catch the interesting bits. There are special fleemarkets were only old stuff is allowed, but the trader are real professionals and they have their prices...I've heard the best fleema kets should be in the Netherlands and England, but I've never seen them, best in Germany was Berlin, I think, but I haven't been there since ten years. BTW, I heard that hotmail (was it hotmail?) got hacked and everybody could read your e-mail there without a password! I don't know if this is true, but I'll better check out yahoo...

eudoramail.com is the one I picked for emergencies on the net. It requires a password. You might like to check it out. (I use Eudora program for my regular Email through my ISP) Good luck. We once had a problem with a lurker and another lady signed on at about the same time with a nomail.com email address. We were all sure it was the same lady and gave her a very hard time. Please be someone we can know! Would not like that to happen to you!!!

Sorry, I didn't know I should have given you a "real" email adress at Spring. Got my old one so full of junk-mail that I wanted to avoid giving a personal email adress to public. OK, I'll see that I get a new one as soon as possible, I promise!..Thanks for your kind advice!

Visto has email! Rememeber, when you sign up for Visto from the link on our main page, we make two big ones towards support of this place.

Isabel!! Yes! Go to Visto - I had quite forgotten! Thanks, Terry!

i forgot about that!

Ooops, sorry! Got that Visto-Information too late...Thanks anyway! Got a new one were I still had my "busy" one... ...just klick at me!

Yup! Your name is your email link! You didit!!!

From Isabel: The first one "Decke" shows a part of the tablecloth I'm working on. It will take me some more years to finish! It's my first needlework since childhood - not perfect, but not that bad, either...

Also From Isabel: The second shows a part of the old pillowcase I bought at the fleamarket.

Did I get them in the right order? Very nice needlework, Dear! Thanks for sharing.

the first piece, isabel, is that similar to hardanger? it's very pretty and i hope we get to see the finished project!! i like the second one too!

The needlework of the first one is called "Hohlsaum" in german, I think it's hemstitch in english, but the stitches are somehow related to hardanger. You pull out threads and then stich a pattern with them. Hardanger and cross-stitch are favorite needleworks in Germany at the moment. Thank you for posting tham, Marcia!

That should have read "them" of course! Silly me!

Isabel, in the interest on keeping the images quick to load, I made the tablecloth small and left the other larger so we could see your needlework. Would you like me to post the URL for the full-sized image of either?

and while we're on the subject of posting pics...i've discovered a free service while running around the american gloxinia organization--photopoint. you can sign up for free and all you do is email your pics to them and they put them into your "album". you get a password so no one can mess with your stuff and you can use them as links to save terry's precious server space. so here's the url if you wanna check them out: http://www.photopoint.com (not trying to do a sales pitch, just thought it would be helpful!)

Hi Marcia! They really look nice the way you posted them.The tablecloth has just the exact size it has in real, I think there's no need to post an URL! Thanks!

Excellent...happy they meet with your approval (my utlimate aim when posting others' graphics...)*grin* The linen did look like canvas until I fiddled with it...now I think it is very like linen!

Wolfie, try posting this on the Porch conference. I think it is a really good idea, though I have not investigated it. I will as soon as I get more stuff to post, though! See what Terry thinks...(and wish we could get some input from...

post what on the porch conference? you mean a link or something?

as soon as I get out of telnet I will check my files and let you know.

ok, so this may not fall under linen but they are crocheted. anybody have directions for these in english? Crochet Rings mom sent a ring to me but it was too big to scan so these are similar. they are in a german crochet project book and my german is rusty at best.

the directions are shown in a graph as well but i can't read that to save my life. do we have an arts & crafts conference? if not, i'd be willing to host that as well! terry? somebody? *grin* marcia, i sure hope you're in through the web, you've got to see my rock picture!

Can't help you with the German but your image is on http://206.97.234.70/~bayou/crochetring.gif for the time being. You never knit reindeer sweaters or argyle sox? All of them have patterns on grid paper I'll be happy to email Terry and hey, I do crafts all the time! I'd be delighted to help and all that or just add my two cents worth! Yippee!!!

Might I co-host with you or shall I bug you to make topics when I need them?

it's not a grid. hmmmm....it's a picture with symbols on it. (and of course you may co-host with me *hugs*) but am not sure if crafty things fall under art or not....

Art it usually isn't but I shall leave that up to Terry. I did not bother him yesterday since he was not even online (he had opened his telnet channel but was nowhere to be found.) I just sent the message and will forward you a copy (why did I not CC you?!) *hugs* Thanks!!!