Well, I stayed away from my blog for much longer than I intended.

I have had my niece, and then my sister and nephew visiting from Australia, and we have been doing some travelling – to Dorset, Cornwall, Northumberland, Derbyshire, London and Lanzarote, amongst other places. We have one more week to enjoy each other’s company before my sister and nephew fly home, and another month or two before my niece (who is staying with us on her gap year before university) moves on to new adventures.

It is strange when you have people you love living on the other side of the world.

In this day and age we can be grateful for electronic communication, meaning that we don’t have to wait weeks for written letters or photographs, as we would have done not that long ago. But something does still get lost in the ether…

Sometimes, seeing my sister and her family on the computer screen, the sun having set where they are, whilst I am only just getting up in the morning; they in their summer clothes, sweating and fanning themselves, me in my jumper moaning about being chilly… well. It does make them feel very far away indeed.

And sometimes, that feeling, that reminder that we are so far apart, that hugs will not be possible at the end of the conversation, that kisses can only be blown and not felt on your cheeks, sometimes, often, that feeling is too much to bear.

So sometimes we go for weeks, months even, without communicating. Because it is too hard. Because we protect ourselves from the pain of missing. Because we don’t know when we will be seeing one another again. And as my sister and I age, the fear creeps in that at some point in the future, we may have seen one another for the last time.

So their visit, the first for five years, has had a lot going on in it. And I don’t just mean all those places we’ve visited.

To begin with, there is a period of acclimatisation, a fear of misunderstandings, an unwillingness to pick at the rawness that has scabbed over since our last meeting. Then that all dissolves, we love and laugh and share and just be. Together.

Then we start to get scared of the pain of parting.

That’s about where I am now. That’s why I’m writing this.

I have been getting up early to see my lad off to school this week, and after he leaves, whilst my family slumbers on, I’ve been distracting myself with pattern and fabric. And I just had to share this antique fabric sample book, found on Andover Fabrics blog. The book was bought at an estate sale in the USA and is full of the most amazing fabrics from the 1830s, like this one:

The book led me in turn to ReproductionFabrics.com, an online store located in Northfield, MN and run by Margo Krager. She has spent over 20 years researching historic cotton printed and yarn-dyed fabrics used in quilts and garments, gives lectures on historic dye, and print technologies and does hands-on workshops on Center Medallion Quilts. And she has a fabulous selection of reproduction historic fabrics for sale on her website.

Thankfully for my dwindling finances, it is too expensive for me to succumb to buying her wares and shipping them over from America, but oh, how they make my heart sing! Check out the fabrics in the 1930 to 1950 section and you will see what I mean…

Beautiful, aren’t they?

Old fabrics often have an element of melancholy about them… their time has been and gone, they’re no longer in production. They may be faded or torn. These reproduction fabrics, however, are new – though based on the designs of the past, these fabrics can be bought in quantity now. They are full of life and colour, waiting to be used with generosity and abundance to make something wonderful, without heed or need of conservation or preservation.

I love old fabrics, but I love these new ones too. They are in and of the current moment, just as much as the past or future.

Vintage fabrics, fragile and scarce, are hard to come by and therefore all the more precious for that.

That thought is one that chimes with my current mood very keenly just now. ♥