Aunt Con’s rhubarb and her sewing box.

     I did a post about Aunt Ethel’s chestnut soup a few months ago, so now its dear departed Aunt Con’s turn to have her moment with her rhubarb.

I had three great aunts, the eldest Aunt Ethel married, the other two were called maiden aunts because they lost their ‘loves’ in the Great War. All three were kindly yet formidable and keen gardeners.

Aunt Con’s legacy has to be her rhubarb, which we always refer to as Aunt Con’s rhubarb, a root of which has been moved from house to house in three of our families for over 60 years.

Here in Brighton a few days ago nothing! Now suddenly here it is again, as resilient  as she was herself.

The sewing box

Needles and cotton, cards holding buttons

fine paper patterns to serve the new fashions

thimbles now battered and bent from their labour

bodkins and ribbons to make a new favour

tiny pearl buttons for pale crepe de chine

boxes of pins to mark out a seam

the life of a woman spent busy with thread

sewing clothes for the living, shrouds for the dead.

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I found her sewing box in my loft before I moved. I was always fond of her and know that she kept her ‘bottom drawer’ all her life. In the old days  middle and upper class women collected items of bed and table linen in a drawer for when they got married.      I discovered after her death, that she sewed her own shroud. On a more cheerful note I have a  dolls dress that she made at school as a sewing exercise and still treasure them.

Aunt Ethel’s chestnut soup post – https://annperrin.wordpress.com/2011/12/12/chestnut-soup-never-mind-nigella-this-is-from-my-aunt-ethels-handwritten-notes-1920/