Elizabeth “Penny” Nichols opens the twelve-gallon ice chest on her patio and pulls out a white hand-crocheted 1940s dress that has been soaking all afternoon. Age-darkened, it has turned the water brown. “Old fabric accumulates acid,” explains Nichols, who soaks such pieces to remove acids and starch, which attracts bugs.
She pulls the side plug on the chest, letting the water drain out, and steps into her kitchen to heat a quart of water in the microwave. To this she adds a tablespoon of sodium perborate (a mineral used as a bleaching agent) and stirs to dissolve it.
Back outside, she replugs the ice chest, pours in the cleaning mixture, adds cool water with a garden hose, and stirs the dress with a wooden spoon to settle it in the solution. “Sometimes I’m out on the patio at ten o’clock at night in my nightgown with a glass of wine in one hand and a wooden spoon in the other,” she says with a laugh.
She may soak an item four or five times before it comes clean. In the case of the crocheted dress, there’s an added challenge—some evil-looking red stains. If they don’t come out, Nichols says, she will try OxiClean detergent as a last resort. A problem piece may soak for four or five days. If spots remain, she sprays Shout on them while the fabric is still wet and leaves it in the ice chest for a day or two, perhaps adding hydrogen peroxide to prevent mildew.
She wraps cleaned pieces in towels to soak up excess moisture and allows them to air dry. “All my rooms have ceiling fans,” she says. “My guest room may have a dozen items draped on beds or drying racks with the fan going full blast.”
Fascinated with fabrics since childhood, Nichols is relentless but patient. She has removed twenty-year-old gravy stains from a set of 1940s linen napkins and restored her grandfather’s 1908 christening bonnet, which had become “almost caramel colored”—but she is realistic about the limits of textiles. “Sometimes a bit of dirt or food has held the fabric together for twenty years,” she says. “Then it hits the water, and a hole develops [when the dirt or food dissolves].”
She is more conservative when cleaning museum textiles. “With a historic piece, I don’t fight to get stains out,” she says. “I do the best I can and then just stabilize it. Traditionally, museums simply stabilize because they don’t want to damage the piece. But in my business [selling antique linens] I have to totally restore them.”
Cleaning historic fabric is a big part of Nichols’ business, Vintage Linens, Etc. Her favorite customers, though, don’t mind the random stain. “The serious collector of textiles realizes that a spot or two is just a bit of history.”
Eva Manghan of Baton Rouge discovered Nichols at the March of Dimes antiques show a few years ago. “I bought a beautiful tablecloth from England,” says Manghan. “It had a linen center, and the bottom eight or ten inches was crochet work, very detailed. I’ve also bought table scarves, pillow covers, and trims. Everything Penny has is beautiful.”
The crocheted dress Nichols is currently treating belongs to the West Baton Rouge Museum in Port Allen, which often calls on her to restore clothing and linens donated to its collection. “We never assume any piece is damaged beyond the pale,” says former museum director Caroline Kennedy. “Penny always does the best job. She’s very generous with her time and her expertise.”
Kennedy is also impressed by Nichols’ ability to identify pieces that stump the experts. Take the set of homemade knit objects that had been entered into the museum database as “doll hats.”
“We knew we needed to look into that a little further,” says Kennedy. “They turned out to be what Penny called ‘glass socks.’ They’re little knitted things that fit over the bottom of a glass as coasters. She knew what those were right away, and she dated them to the late '40s or early '50s.”
As a child in Baton Rouge, Nichols fell in love with textiles when she was four. “My grandmother died and left an unfinished quilt,” she says. “I used to play with the pieces of fabric. They fascinated me.”
She also played with her mother’s collection of 1940s and ‘50s handkerchiefs. “And I loved the lace hankies of my elderly relatives. My mother’s Aunt Mina in Spanish Town always had a lace handkerchief covering her hand. We were told that the tip of her finger had been cut off by an oscillating fan. I used to stare at that hanky and try to catch a glimpse of her finger.” Then there was Aunt Iris. “She had starched white doilies on everything—chairs, tables, everything,” says Nichols. “I thought they looked like octopuses.”
Even in books, Nichols gravitated toward her passion. “I was fascinated by fairy tales like Rapunzel that involved needles, spinning wheels, looms, itinerant weavers who traveled around the country. I identified with them.”
By the time she was in her teens, Nichols was collecting fabrics, mostly family pieces she rescued from the trash—needlework, embroidery, handkerchiefs. She studied art at LSU (she still paints and is a member of the Baton Rouge Art League) and later worked as a textile designer in New York and London.
“One company I worked for, in the Empire State Building, had European sample books from the 1860s and ‘70s. They were cotton fabrics, beautifully printed. I’d stay late after work just to look at those old books.”
She also widened her appreciation of linens. “Living in large cities, I met people from diverse backgrounds and saw their family textiles, which were very different from mine,” she says. “They were linen, more detailed, often European. I started going to flea markets and antiques shops in search of such pieces.”
Back in Baton Rouge she went to work at LSU, where she met the woman she calls her “mentor,” Evva Z. Wilson, who taught her how to identify ages and types of fabric, whether something was natural or synthetic, and how to clean it. “I‘d see Penny at lunch or coffee and try to teach her what I know,” says Wilson, who has a Ph.D. in textiles and taught in the Human Ecology department. “She was like a blotter, soaking up information.”
After collecting linens for years, Nichols started selling them on consignment at a shop in Abita Springs in 1999, then moved into several Baton Rouge locations. Soon she was showing pieces at her home twice a year; then she rented a booth at the March of Dimes antiques show. She now sells at the Main Street Market and at Antiques on Perkins, where a hot item is Turkey-red towels, made with dye developed in Turkey in the late 1800s.
Besides tablecloths and tea towels, she sells lavender sachets, soaps, sprays, and bath salts—all of which she herself makes. She also offers packets of Fabric Bright (sodium perborate) for soaking linens and gives customers a sheet of cleaning tips based on techniques she has perfected. Besides linens, she carries framed prints, silverware, and china, much of it from England.
To replenish her stock, Nichols began going to the Chelsea flea market in New York, buying from East Coast dealers whose linens, she maintains, are finer than most found in the South. “I love the early-morning markets,” she says. “Going through bags and boxes of stuff, and hearing the dealers' stories—‘This belonged to a 103-year-old lady on Long Island.’”
One fortuitous New York find was Iranian prayer rugs from the 1920s. “I bought three from a guy on the street. I thought, ‘These are neat; let’s see if anybody wants them.’ I took them home, cleaned them, and sold them almost immediately. I called a New York friend to go find the man and buy more. I ended up buying several hundred. They sold like crazy. People use them as table runners.” As one of the few buyers to venture out during a snowstorm, she found an 1860s quilt top. “It was badly damaged, so I cut the squares apart and made pillows out of them.”
Loath to discard a piece of history, she finds new ways to use old fabrics, making them into sachets, table runners, handbags, and Christmas stockings. Single embroidered pillowcases, dating from the 1920s to the 1950s, are the perfect size for little girls’ dresses. Nichols puts a drawstring through the top, cuts and binds the armholes, and sews on grosgrain-ribbon shoulder ties. Doting grandmothers snap up the one-of-a-kind dresses.
Nichols now makes annual buying trips to England and has ventured into France and Sweden. “I bought a bag of laces in a Paris flea market—baby bonnets, Battenberg table scarves. After I got home and checked my reference books, I realized they were a hundred years old.” Two years ago, on her way to England, she detoured through Sweden. “I found out about a Sunday-morning flea market in a parking garage beneath a shopping mall outside Stockholm,” she says. “I went there by train and bought wonderful old Swedish linens—lots of ruffles, crisp embroidery designs and colors. I was the only foreigner there, and I was treated wonderfully.”
In 2003, Nichols added a 400-square-foot room to her house, which she uses as a studio. Its 5x15 closet holds a washer and dryer and specially installed racks for tablecloths. (A second washer is in a nearby shed.) With two walls that are mostly glass, the room has “fabulous natural light,” says Nichols. The floor is ceramic tile, so she can lay towels and wet pieces on it to dry. Her computer is there, but with comfortable rattan furniture and a TV, it doubles as a family room. Nichols also holds home sales there every spring and fall.
She admits she can get lost in her work. “Whether I’m studying the workmanship on a particular item, restitching or mending a part of it, treating a stain, or pressing a piece, I get consumed by it,” she says. “I have always had a very strong sense of history. I think about the special dinners served on a particularly beautiful tablecloth or the hope and excitement generated by a wedding handkerchief. As I handle these beautiful old pieces I can almost hear their stories.”
