Very tasty pin cushions

I’ve been making pin cushions out of damaged, vintage embroidered tablecloths.

The embroidery was done in the Forties and Fifties and I only recently realised the pattern was already printed onto the linen so in that sense it was easy as they had a pattern to sew on.

You can tell how good the person was at embroidery partly because sometimes they didn’t cover the lines properly so you can see bits of the printing which should have been covered.

The real art though is in the colours. I’ve been collecting vintage table cloths for 20 years and so often I’ll see one which has been expertly made yet the colours aren’t very inspiring and I always think what a shame to have worked so hard and spent so many hours making it yet the result isn’t too enchanting. That’s unfortunately the case with most of them which is why when I find ones like these it’s like finding gold dust.

I wonder about the ladies who made them. Were they young, middle aged, elderly ? How did they even have time to embroider tablecloths when they had so much else to do, cooking from scratch, hand washing, looking after their families etc without all the mod cons we have.

Saying that though, they didn’t have televisions and if I didn’t watch so much TV I could probably embroider at least a couple of large table cloths every week 🙂 I’m glad they did it though so I don’t have to.

So here they are all together. I’ve also added some vintage fabric flowers to make them even more colourful and scrumptious.

And here they are all dressed for Easter.
I think a pin cushion should be beautiful because it’ll be next to you while you sew  year after year. Mine is one of the very first things I made and I still love it.