When my sister D got married my mother got all broody and spent many days making her linen sheets with drawn thread work for the matrimonial bed.
I remember her doing this quite clearly, pulling several lines of thread from the weave of the sheets and then sewing thread around these to create a decorative pattern in a line on the hem where the sheet would be turned over the blanket.
I remember it taking her ages.

In Le Presbytere, we have decided, particularly in the two front rooms, that we need some curtains for the windows. (The French on the whole don’t do curtains, preferring to use shutters.)
This is partly for the modesty of people undressing at night,(Irish people are, we have discovered, reluctant to draw the shutters) partly to soften the rather severe lines of the rooms and partly to provide some shade from the morning sun.

Linen seemed to us the ideal material for the job.
It has the right sort of translucence not to take too much light from the rooms but also is heavy enough to fall gracefully.

When we put a new set of red linen curtains in the restaurant in Waterford, covering two windows roughly the same size as the windows in the front rooms here, my memory (disputed by Sile, who says they cost less) is that they cost us €1200.

While we were gathering together our stuff to take across to France in January Síle had found some sheets inherited from her Aunt Emer.
On closer inspection they were linen, not just linen but linen with beautiful drawn thread work.
Perfect for curtains.

When we tried them out here we found that only one was long enough , ( both windows are over 260 cms (around 8 ft.) high but this was wide enough to do for one window. The others were going to have to be cobbled together to fit the other window somehow.

This morning there was Vide Grenier in the nearby St Genies de Fontadet.
This is a fair where all the householders (and visiting dealers it must be said) spread all their wares out like a giant car boot sale in the village and where much rubbish and the occasional bargain can be had.

Síle, eagle eyed, spotted an old linen sheet in a cardboard box by a stand.
Opened it out- it looked big enough, and it had perfect drawn thread decoration- and asked how much.
“Trois Euro ?” said the man.
For once there was no arguing. We paid and left.
When we got it home we found it a perfect fit for the second window, the drawn thread work perfectly done (and in a different way from the Irish style) and of a slightly heavier linen that falls even better that the other sheets, and every hem on the sheet was hand stitched.
There was at least a weeks work on the sheets stitched by a bride or her mother for her bottom drawer many years ago.
For this we were charged three Euros.

We also left the Vide Grenier with a large glass jar for preserving fruit, a faux bamboo coat rack and a souffle dish.
Entire expenditure on these? Just €18.

As I said sometimes there are bargains in the Vide Grenier.