Amongst the many Pinterest folders I have accumulated over the years, there is one I had called Autochrome vintage postcards: a sickeningly sublime collection of vintage postcards, with twentieth-century ladies decked out in dreamy poses. Despite my apparent roughness and rusticity….

I was born in the wrong century.

Or maybe I was fed nineteenth-century romances as a child and my imagination was shaped in elegant parlours where young ladies displayed lovable virtues and enviable embroidery skills. Charlotte Bronte also embroidered brilliantly, in spite of those who, in today’s TV shows set in that era, put in the mouths of emancipated women roles the idea that those who embroidered did not know how to use their brains.

So every now and then I fall back into the past.

The occasion this time was offered to me by the Le dame dell’ago (The ladies of the needle) event to be held in Mantua on 17 and 18 May: I wanted to bring the ladies… To the Ladies.

I traced a few outlines from the most interesting postcards, produced some drawings, threw away a fair amount and finally saved three.

My sweet friends had nipped the idea in the bud. I had sent a few pictures of the first work in progress and, if I had not promptly stopped replying to their messages, they would have soon advised me to set it on fire, sending my feeble motivation up in smoke. While I was embroidering, then, two out of two children (the third one I am not sure still lives in this house…), passing by chance around me, one after the other, in the same way, as if they were acting out the same script, had stuck out their lower lip in a pose of doubt and then exclaimed: Ah! You embroidering people?! You are more one who embroiders letters and little flowers….

Nothing. I can’t take it, when they stick labels on me….

Challenge match, I had to reshuffle the first candidate’s face, because the pompous lips and all those colours in the roses confused and made the poor thing pale. Yeah, whatever… gloat! You were right about that! Over there, my little friends are gloating: they wanted me to colour their cheeks with long and short stitch…

I got the colours from other postcards. Real ones, which I stole from my mum. They are all slightly grey, desaturated and irresistibly vintage colours.

But those faded backgrounds had ignited the urge in me to colour the fabric too, so I went for the stain, with fabric colours. I don’t know what I will do with it. I threw myself into this little project too quickly to even think about that. But at the moment I’ll take them unmade like this to Mantua and in the meantime I’ll collect drawings, colours and brief explanations, in case anyone is interested!