It’s amazing what a blog post comment can spark. A couple of days ago, the very lovely Thea from Thea & Sami wrote this blog post about her stunning new design, and I left a comment to answer her question about possible new colour options for this latest print. Lo and behold, this morning I saw that she’d actually visited my site, read my “About Me” page, and left me a comment that, as I read it, I knew what I had to do.

In her comment, Thea had written, “…I really enjoyed reading this especially the part where your father upcycled the old suits. So new age!” And as I read that, I laughed to myself and thought, “Dad would have loved to hear that! He always liked to think of himself as avant garde, ahead of the game, a forward thinker, an outside-the-square ideas man. That kind of thing. Upcycling! Yeah, he woulda loved that!

So as I’m thinking about all that, I pictured him in his factory, but not the one in Flinders Lane here in Melbourne. No, I mean the one in Poland, when he was a young man, where my Dad was trained to be a tailor. He must have been trained by his father, who was most likely trained by his father, my great-grandfather. My next thought was that I really need to pull out that photograph I have of my great-grandfather’s factory, put it up on the page, and write a bit about it for you to read. And that took me to pulling out all my old photos of Dad, and the album that his wife, Yvonne, gave me, the one she’d made of all his and my old photos. I just wish I had some photos of Dad’s factory in Melbourne, or even just one of him sewing. Such a shame that I don’t.

But if you’d like to see the old photo I uploaded just now, go to my About Me page.
Thank you, Thea!