What's the story?

When you buy something in a charity shop, do you ever stop to think about its history? When I hunt in charity shops, there are three things I really look for: books (especially children’s books), fabrics, and drinking glasses. I struck lucky again last week with a couple of hardback Brambly Hedge books, and this beautiful curtain for just £1. The colours remind me of Pat Hutchin's books from the 70s (Rosie's Walk, and Clock & More Clocks are favourites in this house). It joins a gorgeous patchwork quilt (an extortionate £4) as one of my all time favourite finds.

  

What I love about them most (apart from the price and the sheer serendipity of the find), is thinking about the story behind them. Why are they there, looking all unloved in the corner of a musty smelling charity shop? Whose hands painstakingly stitched this quilt, and what had these squares belonged to in the first place? In quilting terms it's not a masterpiece - it's a simple squares pattern, machine sewn in strips, and quilted using the stitch-in-the-ditch technique; but I love sitting in bed with a cup of tea in my hand, studying the different fabrics and running my hands over them.

Were those flannelette flowers part of a favourite pair of pyjamas? That corduroy the pair of dungarees a toddler learnt to walk in? Who was it made for? How many other people slept beneath it before me? What happened to its owner, that he/she no longer needs it? And how come that pink & orange swirly fabric in the middle is exactly the same as the pattern I remember on the bathroom bin in my parents' house in the 70s?

And this curtain: it’s been handmade with great care (weights in the corners and everything), and still has a row of curtain hooks in the tape at the top, but the tape hasn’t been gathered up, and the threads haven’t been distorted in the way you’d expect when the hooks take the weight of the cloth. So why is there only one, and why has it apparently never been used? And what shall I do now with all this gorgeous fabric?