Phew! Fixing up my studio and sorting through/listing my patterns is taking way more energy than I expected. Still no excuse for dropping off the face of the blog-world. There's not much sewing or crafting going on right now, but I thought I would share one of my favourite sewing artifacts from my collection.
This is Peggie Gibson's Home Economics note book, from 1939/40. One of these days I'll get around to taking the rings out and scanning each page, but for now I offer a few highlights.
I love her drawings, and the way she used bits of fabric for colour. The pictures cut out from pattern and fashion magazines are great for seeing what caught a young girl's eye at the time. I keep wincing when I find cuttings from gorgeous catalogues, but I guess it would have been like cutting up your copy of the Anthropologie catalogue now. Not such a big deal.
I wish I could walk into a fabric store now and buy these by the yard. They'd be more likely to end up as quilts than clothes, except for that great navy at the bottom of the second column.
There are some gorgeous sewing samples in the notebook, and I want to find a way to capture them better than the scanner can. Peggie used a lot of liquid glue in her notebook so the pages are pretty warped and it's interfering with capturing the pages accurately.
In other news, I think I've figured out what my first summer sewing project should be.
I've totally seen these dresses made up before and couldn't figure out what the slits were all about. Shorts! Of course!
Also, the store is full of new patterns, and I'm in the process of listing a huge amount of plus size and half size patterns over the next few days.
I hope everyone's week is off to a great start!
4 comments:
I LOVE Peggy's book, how wonderful to own it. I love it most of all when I have a story behind the patterns and the fabric that I acquire. I recently went to a deceased estate garage sale and was only lucky enough to get some lengths of fabric and dozens of fabulous scraps of fabric from this Nonna's rich history of dressmaking. Judging from the scraps it ranges from the 40's to the 70's. The patterns and clothes were all gone by the time I got there.
Oh wow! Peggie's book is amazing! I wonder where she is now?
Oh dear... then I thought it through and realised she would be really rather old by now, if she is still alive at all...
Well, it looks like it's her grade 9 notebook, so she would have been about 14 in 1939. That means she could be hanging out at 87 (if my math's right - art school degrees do not make for good math skills), rocking bingo night at the retirement home.
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