Adventures - Finding Treasure
As adventures or explorers you have to see the possibilities for creative ideas from anything or anywhere.
Ruti - We often had no specific ideas of what we were looking for but we were open to see whether anything would trigger our imagination which would later translate into a design idea.
A lucky find
Many times we found wonderful lace fabric or pieces of lace which we saw as treasure, unlike the people we bought it from. They viewed it as rubbish and were pleased to get rid of it. In one East End shop we found lace material from the 1953 Queen's Coronation.
Many times we found wonderful lace fabric or pieces of lace which we saw as treasure, unlike the people we bought it from. They viewed it as rubbish and were pleased to get rid of it. In one East End shop we found lace material from the 1953 Queen's Coronation.
Helping out helped The Fool
A Greek man came to see if we wanted to buy some crochet tray cloths. His mother and her friends needed to make money in their village. They knew how to crochet and made item for their family, babies clothes or decorative covers for tables, trays or for covers for sofas. Aury wanting to help them commissioned them to crochet decorative shapes. Ruti and Myrna incorporated the cotton crochet shapes into a variety of tops with crushed velvet. Here is an example. |
A lucky find
Lace from Amsterdam
Lace from Amsterdam
The Dappermarkt, photographed from the Eerste van Swindenstraat, 1983
Ruti and Myrna travelled to Amsterdam in the 1970s / 1980s looking for lace or fabric for inspiration for The Fool. What we bought we piled into black dustbin bags. We dragged these bags through customs at Heathrow Airport without anyone stopping us or checking what we had in them.
The Rijksmuseum has the largest lace collection in the Netherlands. It comprises around 3,500 pieces dating from the late sixteenth to the early twentieth century.
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