Before screens

While in our favourite emporium, Emmaus,( charitable, recycling and work-creating place) a few days ago and happened to note in the linens area the bed cover featured below. I didn't need it but felt compelled to buy it just to marvel, probably forever, at the painstaking creativity and patience involved in such a thing. I imagine it was probably made for a new homestead, a creation to adorn the marital double bed. Perhaps the wife to be had spent weeks, possibly months crochet hook in hand by oil lamp light every evening after the days jobs had been completed, or perhaps her mother did, or all the women of the family had taken part, making the little triangles to be sewn together. 

So, for twelve euros, an amount I could have spent on a pair of cheap supermarket pillowcases we now have the cover adorning our bed, not a stitch missing, not a pulled thread of its blanc cassé heavy cotton makeup. Amazing that it has survived perhaps a hundred years or so without so much as a tea stain spoiling its uniform colour.