I Love Tulips

I don't know about you, but I just love tulips - real life, brightly coloured tulips, especially those big blousy parrot tulips in strange colours and patterns. I have an old rectangular tulip vase in blue delft, with holes in the lid to take these once very precious blooms, and I still take a lot of pleasure from using it, even today, when tulips aren't quite so costly as they once were. But I also love tulips in textile design and once you start looking for them, you seem to see them everywhere. Here's a nice Scottish example I found myself listing in my eBay shop earlier today. This is a piece of very old crochet lace, which is actually an edging for a tablecloth. I suspect it may have been used but carefully removed, when the linen centre wore out. Or maybe it was never used at all, but made and put away - it has some small pieces of discolouration, but stored textiles often do acquire these nasty little marks unless you put them away very clean and dry and carefully wrapped in white acid free tissue. Laundering has already helped, and will probably help some more, but the work itself is lovely - as you can see from the picture above - with lots of stylised, deco tulips - a bit reminiscent of our very own Charles Rennie Mackintosh  - and how those shapes lend themselves to that design! I'm hoping somebody buys this, restores it - and makes a wonderful tablecloth out of it.