I am definitely more of a “broad” than anybody's notion of a “girlie girl.” An old boyfriend once disparagingly compared my walk to that of a football player and, despite a certain verbal grace, everybody knows that I can have the mouth of a stevedore as well. I laugh loudly and am highly opinionated, I shovel manure, I am not particularly domestic and I definitely take a back seat to my husband when it comes to the baking of cakes and fussy pies. There is nothing about me on the outside that explains the stuff most people never see - the love of candles and firelight, of French milled soaps, pearls,  “green” perfumes, handmade lace, silk ribbons and the novels of Colette.  Somehow, underneath it all, I'm an incurable romantic at heart.

I am also the daughter of a seamstress, a woman who once apprenticed herself to a tailor in order to learn some of the finer points of making beautiful clothes. Growing up, I had the good fortune to benefit from her abilities in a number of different ways, from exquisitely tailored jackets to beautiful lingerie; and although I live now almost entirely in blue jeans and sweat pants, I have never lost the love of running my fingers over fabric that is still on the bolt, or the knowledge that in capable hands, lovely textiles can be wonderfully transformed into almost anything a  person could desire.

At some point in the last decade, prompted by an impulse I now can’t even recall, I made the somewhat peculiar decision to spend the rest of my life sleeping only on pure white sheets. To be precise, only on pure white cotton sheets, and pillow cases trimmed with hand made white lace. Although Sasha no doubt considered this to be a rather extreme eccentricity on my part, he must have found something charming in it too, because that was when my white “revolution” began.

In a world that has online shopping and especially eBay, it was relatively easy to replace the existing household prints and colours with a beautiful collection of vintage bed linens, all in pristine condition, for relatively little cost. Not only were such things terribly out of fashion and not at all politically correct, but by most modern women they were also regarded to be dull, labour intensive and totally unhip. To me, they were the very embodiment of romance, calling forth from the imagination the promise of cool breezes blowing gently through gauze curtains on starlit summer nights. Even now, these long years later, my crisp white sheets, lightly sprayed with lavender linen water, make crawling into bed at the end of every day an almost indescribable delight.

The second thing I decided, flowing naturally from the thing about the sheets, was that I would also only wear white nighties. No PJs for me. Pretty white nighties made of natural fibres are a commodity not easily to be found, particularly if one lives on a farm in rural Nova Scotia, so it has always been a challenge finding something decent to suffice. My favourite Eileen West nightdress, a treasure purchased years ago in Boston, recently became tattered beyond redemption and turned out to be hideously expensive to replace. Not sold in Canada, and available only through the smallest handful of online sources in the US, gowns like my beautiful Eileen West are costly in the first place and absolutely prohibitive to import, especially when exorbitant shipping tariffs are applied.

No longer having anything special to sleep in and recalling the days when I had the luxury of custom made clothing right at home, it dawned on me finally that the best and surest way to solve my white sleepwear dilemma was simply to choose  the fabrics and notions myself and have everything made to order, so this is exactly what I have done. 

This afternoon I returned happily from the seamstress with no fewer than three gorgeous white cotton nightgowns to sleep in and enjoy all summer long. Prettily pin tucked and trimmed with white silk ribbons and beautiful bits of vintage lace, they are the stuff of any girlie girl’s dreams. Given what I went through to acquire them, obviously they are the stuff of my dreams too and I thank Susan Richards with all my heart for every perfect stitch.