The story about the German hankies

On my birthday last year, my gorgeous friends Ruth, Cam, Edie and Oscar gave me a rather unusual gift. It looks like this.

It's full of carefully ironed and folded hankies, of all sizes and designs, and it was bought from an old lady at a flea market in Germany. Cool, huh? 

The main thing I love about this gift (apart from the sheer beauty of some of the hankies inside) is the fact that even though a special hankie-folder is kind of a random gift to buy for someone, my friends just knew that I'd love it. And I did.

Every now and then I pull it out and look at the hankies and think about what I could do with them. Until now, though, no projects lent themselves to the special hankie collection.

But now it's summer, and we need of an alternative to the heavy wool curtain adorning the eastern window in our loft.

So I decided to make this, using just a handful of the beautiful hankies, all the way from Germany, and a piece of white cotton I found at the op-shop. 

It's partly inspired by a project of Soule Mama's, which utilises the hankies in the same way, and partly inspired by a book I recently borrowed from the library which was all about, you know, making stuff out of other stuff. 

Goes nice with the hardwood and pale-blue corrugated iron and very nice jewel blanket

We love it. It's perfectly light and airy so lets the breeze flow over us as we snuggle and read of an evening, and we all love just staring at it, trying to decide which of the hankies is our favourite. 

Pearl and Olive are rather partial to the spots

Oski's keen on the lace, bottom left

And this one, which is not done justice by the photo, is pretty magical

It's hard to choose, don't you think?

But best of all, the curtain always reminds us of our beautiful friends and the vision they showed at a German flea market a couple of years ago. Thanks beautiful ones. It's so lovely to have you in our home.