Peasant embroidery made a comeback in the 1970s, when I made several shirts with embroidered peasant designs. I even tried one very similar to the smocked Mexican style below. Argh! Why did I give all those clothes away! I wish I had the actual McCall’s transfers for these patterns, but, as a substitute, I do have some peasant…
To me, this apron seems excessive, even if it is supposed to be for “company.” An apron doesn’t need to provide all that coverage, and if you’re going to put that much work into it, you might as well just make an actual dress. The wrap dress below reminds me so much of my mother, who…
There were tons of apron patterns produced in the 40s and 50s, but the McCall’s and Advance patterns are my favorites. There are four pages of apron patterns in this particular 1940s catalog, and I want to make all of them.
These dressing tables are so old-fashioned now, but I still love seeing them in old movies (Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca has one of the best). We even had one of the kidney-shaped dressers when I was little, and I remember my mother making a new skirt for it. Maybe she used this pattern. I want to make…
My mother-in-law, Gail, recently gave me this quilt which she found while cleaning out her enormous linen closet. Although she was sure one of her relatives had made it, she couldn’t remember any of the details. The quilt was clean, had never been washed, and the fabrics were in wonderful condition. There was just one…
A little bit of hand embroidery adds so much to these sweet outfits from the 1940s.
The cover was torn off of this old McCall’s Needlework Pattern Catalog, but I know it’s from the 1940s, some time during WWII. The text will be readable if you enlarge the image.
“Think hard about who is the very nicest person you know, and then plan to send this valentine.” Here is a valentine activity from a 1924 Montana newspaper, The Billings Gazette. I have cleaned and re-sized the image, and you should be able to print the outside and inside of the valentine on letter-sized paper — card stock for the…
First I want to show you some of the vintage quilting stencils from my collection. This wonderful group was sent to me by Gina Bailey (doecdoe on Instagram). The stencils were traced and cut from what looks a lot like the cardboard that used to come folded inside my dad’s laundered shirts. When we were young,…
Mickie asked about other individual RSM patterns, so here is a newspaper design from 1926. Although I love these butterflies, I can’t imagine wanting to stitch them in all white, or even with “spots of color” as suggested below. I would probably stitch the whole butterfly in jewel tones. Nothing is more nearly a universal…
On Saturday I received a package from my friend, Patty, with two cute feedsacks I’d purchased from her Etsy shop (Patalier). Patty always includes a few vintagy surprises for me, and this time there were skeins of vintage perle cotton, gathered eyelet edging, two sweet hostess aprons (for a later post), and this l922 soft…
. . . an old box stuffed with vintage quilt pieces. In this case, thousands of 1″ squares purchased on ebay that some nice quilter neatly strung together with double thread. What was she going to make with all these postage stamp sized pieces? Fortunately, and I love it when this happens, she made one…