Brittany Blues

These aren't the sad Blues...These are the refreshing,
mysterious,
invigorating,
manmade
as well as natural
blues...
...of our week's holiday in Brittany, northern France.
The blues of nature and the sea are reflected in a love of blue on land.
You can imagine I was happy!
We spent a week in a gite (holiday cottage - not pictured!) with Ben's parents.
We enjoyed the sea and the river,
prehistory and history,
cider, galettes and and crepes.
The blue hydrangeas (different soil to down here, sigh...) are used in the colourful house numbers.
The blue of the sea inspires the others...


Incidental details on the houses are usually blue.
And windows and shutters are very nearly obliged to be blue!
Over time,
transport also seems to have been traditionally...
...blue!
I'll leave you with some beautiful blue windows...



... and I'll tell you more tomorrow!

Something old, something new, something borrowed and a search for blue...

No, no-one's getting married - the title just seems to sum up the varied things I have to post today!
When I was searching for a background to photo Juanita's lovely necklace, I turned up this charming little hand-embroidered bib.

Can you imagine any baby actually wearing it? Surely it was for a Christening day, or just a present, never to be worn?? Our boys' bibs were, of necessity, a whole lot larger and a whole lot plainer!

Somebody has enbroidered the word 'pet' on it, which I never really liked, personally. I know it's a human term of endearment too, but for me, this is what a pet looks like:

Note the half-tail! That's a tail for another post...

Here's the back of the bib, which I like best of all, because it's plain cotton rather than synthetic silk. And here is an adorable cloth button. I love the little details...

Here is something new from something old - Penny's cardigan, which I showed you last week. If you remember, it was all brown, with brown buttons and no colour. This looked great with Penny's sparkly silver hair, but does nothing for my paler colouring, so I changed the buttons for vintage Mother of Pearl ones...

and shortened the cuffs until they were the right length for me, trimming them with some lovely fabric from a much-loved T-shirt which recently gave up the ghost after over 10 years' active service... Here is me, wondering how on earth to get a good photo of the cardi when the mirror is screwed to the wall opposite the window...
You've had the old and the new, and here is something borrowed: I read Kari Meng's lovely blog The Warp and the Weft today and I think that, if you don't follow it anyway, you should read today's post. Once again, she's been given access to an old treasure-house with 'tons of old stock - ribbon, notions and millinery...' She has few photos on the post, but her descriptions of how she made the fascinating contacts which led to today's news are well worth reading.

And here is something blue! You'll note from my blog that I rather like blue, but I now have a problem. The upstairs bathroom is blue and the kitchen is blue. The spare bedroom is blue-ish. The living area's spring colours have often been green/blue/yellow, but this year they are more predominantly blue. Bit by bit, I am removing the orange and rainbow colours which have kept us warm this winter, and am replacing them with blue. And, before I get to the end of the orange, I have run out of blue!

Items from the kitchen and the spare room are creeping into the living area; these vintage-quilt cushions, for example. But I have now officially run out. Tragically, I now have a Mission - to scour Troc Shops, Vide Greniers, Charity Shops etc for Blue. Life is hard, sometimes...

Blue is...

... every road sign in a French town... this one particularly inspires me...

... a blue Cedar in our garden...

... some fantastic fabric I bought in Veti'relais last week...

... Great great... great Uncle Joshua's bow tie...

... a little boy in the kitchen who reminds me of our own boys...

... so I had to buy two of them...

... a recent find from the troc shop - a lovely cake tin....

... an older purchace - ikat weaving I found in a charity shop in the 1980s - still one of my favourites...

... dwarf irises on our window ledge...

... metalic blue glinting inside a Fair Trade lantern... (it's just an old metalic balloon for a bit of colour!)...

... a weird but wonderful wind chime in the kitchen...

... my personal failing - a Fair Trade blue patchwork bag which fell apart, but I can't throw it away...

... so I recently made one myself...

... and I knocked up this cushion over the summer, too...

...but THESE are something special - my grandma bought a quilt from the 1860s, we think, at a Devon jumble sale. When it fell apart my mother gave it to me to see what I could salvage. Here are two cushions from the remaining good parts...

... a detail of fabric about 150 years old...

... and another, all stitched by hand... who made it? I wonder, as I do my own inferior stitching on it...

... a modern French salt cellar in the kitchen...

... and a 1920s French water container, also in the blue and white kitchen...

... which has recently become home to some of the commemorative mugs that Ben was given as a youngster...

... and I still love blue more than any colour, so I'm once again at work on a blue project:..

...old skirts and jeans, mainly, most of them treasured until they fell apart...

I can never have enough blue!