Spring allergies

I like posts with quotes but I can never find a suitable one. This is what I found when I looked for a quote about hankies.

A "Bushman's Hanky" is slang for blowing your nose without a tissue. Learn
how here.

Okay, that's not exactly what I had in mind. And I have no interest in learning how to do that because I'm sure it's not a pretty thing.

But these are pretty, aren't they?

I bought them recently at an antique show. The lady's late Aunt Evelyn owned them, so I was thrilled to find some monograms for me. It's not all that common.

Except when you're buying Dutch chocolate letters at Christmas. When the mix of letters comes based on Dutch names, I'm in luck. There are always plenty of E's left over, even after Christmas. Lucky me! That's totally off topic though. (Focus, Ev, focus.)

This is why I'm thinking of hankies today.

Alice is home sick, but I suspect from the ever-present dark circles under her eyes that she is suffering from allergies. Perhaps she has a cold or flu as well. We're using quite a few hankies around here.

This winter I decided to try to cut back on the paper products we use in this house. Paper towels and kleenex are always in hot demand here and so easy to do without. (I'm tempted to talk about Diva now, but that's probably all you need to know about that! There are probably males present.)

I can't keep up with all of the environmental options out there. I know that the textiles industry is supposed to be terrible for pollutants and chemicals and child labour and all those things. But I don't buy many clothes. I re-use a lot of clothes between the three girls, get lots of hand-me-downs and sometimes buy used. And I have to believe that sewing clothes is better than off the rack, maybe only because it means we all do with less because my sewing time in limited. There are too many factors to figure out, but I believe that hankies must be better than kleenex. And I hope that fewer chemicals are in contact with my nose this way too.

Anyway, I'm using scraps that would otherwise have gone into the landfill. These are my favourites. They are flannel and much softer than any paper product I've ever put to my nose and my nose deserves some luxury. Being on my face can't be easy.


I've seen pretty hankies hemmed in contasting threads and fancy stitches. I'm capable of that, but most of mine are quickly serged on the edges. It's what I have time for and, from my nose's point of view, I don't actually like the extra two layers of fabric on the edges.

A quick hanky box story: When I was growing up my dad always had a box full of hankies. It was just a shoe box, nothing fancy. For a few years I remember having indoor Easter basket hunts in the house. Each basket had our name on the handle and if you found someone else's basket you were supposed to leave it there and let them find it themselves. My basket was hidden in the hanky box one year. It's not amusing or anything, but it's actually one of the few memories I have from the house I lived in until I was 7.

Our hanky box isn't big enough for that. However, I like that I've come full circle and returned to some of the ways of the past.

Yvon called just after arriving at work to say his allergies finally hit him today. While I have year-round allergies to lots of things, his tend to come once a year and hit him hard. So the plan today is to zip up some quick man-sized hankies for him.

And yes, that's a poodle picture. I've now sewn three skirts, but they still need their poodles on them. I'll be making a poodle patch to attach to each skirt just in case the girls don't want to keep the poodle on after the 50th anniversary concert at school. I drew a picture of a poodle yesterday which the girls thought was an alien chicken! What would I do without Google?