Lovely Gifts from a Lovely Stranger

These things just don't happen to me. I'm still pinching myself on this one.

Sunday was DH's (Bruce) birthday (he's celebrating his "dyslexic 26th birthday", which is an improvement over last year's "dyslexic 16th birthday, LOL!). Bruce's brother (Doug) called on Sunday morning to say he was coming over with a gift for me. We thought he'd maybe started, ...uh, "celebrating" a bit early, LOL, and figured he really meant a gift for Bruce. But no, he'd forgotten Bruce's birthday, and the gift was indeed for me.

Doug walked in with a large carton of Stuff. It seems he's met a friend on Facebook, a dear whose name is also Catherine, who is moving to Utah in the near future and is downsizing. She had gone through the things that her grandmother, a quilter and sewist, had passed on to her, and now she wanted to pass them on to me (Doug had mentioned his crazy sister-in-law - that would be MOI - to her). When I took a peek at what was in the box, I nearly fainted!

The first thing that caught my eye was a pile of vintage hankies. You know me and vintage hankies - never met one I didn't love. And the laces. Vintage laces make me weak in the knees anyway, and there were so many..... I won't even begin to describe them here - you'll see the pictures. But I do want to mention the salesman samples of lace, complete with tags giving their product number and price. These are old!!! And there were books, a 1930 Herrschner's magazine (mint condition) with accompanying thimbles, trims, ribbons, braids, sequins, bias tapes & rayon bindings, and assorted "bits and bobs".

All of this was a gift from a woman I don't know. YET. I sent my card off with DBIL, he gave the info to Catherine, and we've been able to correspond a bit. I'm really looking forward to meeting her and getting to personally thank her. And I feel a big need to Pay it Forward, so I'll be doing some thinking on this............

But in the meantime, would you like some vicarious thrills, my friends???

These, obviously, are the hankies. Aren't they gorgeous?? And they are in lovely condition, definitely not cutters.

And here are the books. Every one of these books is a treasure, and I've only scanned them. I'll be digging deeper during the week.

This the Spring 1930 issue of the Herrschner's catalog, along with a Herrschner's thimble that came with it, and Catherine's note about the other accompanying thimble. It gives them a bit of provenance, don't you think?

I'm only going to show you this one page for now, because I don't want to handle the magazine too much. However, I'm going to do what Pam Kellogg did several weeks ago, which is to scan the magazine then show a few pages each post. I'll get that started next month probably (too many deadlines for me in May).

And now, here are some of the laces. I'll show more in the next post, but there's plenty here to feast the eyes on. These are all of nearly uniform length. Each has a paper tag attached at the left of the strip which gives a product number and (usually) the price. Oh, if these were only the prices we had to pay today, LOL!!

The patterns are so beautiful - and different from today's patterns.

Is there anyone out there who is knowledgeable enough about laces to hazard a guess as to what the possible dates of these might be (given the prices)???

These are just some examples of the laces in various widths. There are far too many to show them all.

But I will have more samples to show you next time in still different widths. And then there are all the crocheted laces (removed from garments and linens), and other laces, and, and....

To wind this up, however, I must tell you that dear Bruce had a wonderful birthday Sunday, even if his brother forgot him, LOL! He got lots of Barnes & Noble gift cards from the kids, and an IPOD from me. We had our coffee date at the bookstore, dinner out, and even spent some time out in the yard between the rainshowers. Life is good.