Yesterday was a fairly long workday, for a Tuesday. (I teach only one class on Tuesdays but because I had the students' soils in the muffle furnace for a loss-on-ignition test for carbon, I had to hang around until after 5 pm).

Once I got home, I worked some on the second Pay it Forward gift, but then switched to sewing Grandmother's Flower Garden blocks. I finished one that had been partly done and started another.



This block uses scraps of fabric from a blouse I had when I was a child - my mother made it for me and she hung onto the scraps of fabric left over and gave some of them to me when I started quilting.

I like being able to "save" fabrics I like in a quilt. (Most quilts last longer than most clothing does; if you're careful with a quilt it can outlive you). I was very fond of mice as a child and this fabric features little "leprechaun mice" (well, that's what I'm guessing, from the little hats). It's a funny fabric, and I'm guessing it's from the early 70s, as I was a fairly small child when I had the blouse. (And I doubt my mom would have been buying novelty fabrics like this to "have on hand" before she had children.) I wonder if this fabric maybe came from Dodds, which was a sort-of department store in my town, which in its earlier days, used to sell fabric.

I can just barely remember the blouse - it had a yoke of white fabric and the main body was of the mouse fabric, and on the white yoke, up high, on either side, she appliqued little ovals from the mouse fabric. (It was kind of a western-shirt style, almost.)

I also started another block, this one made of reproduction 30s fabric:



I love the 1930s reproduction prints because they are so cute. More than that, they have a sense of whimsy to them - even the flower prints are not all that realistic, they are kind of cartoonish (unlike some of the modern florals, where there seems to be an emphasis on realism and some of the prints are almost photorealistic).

And the colors are sort of happy - almost Jordan Almond-type colors, sort of grayed-pastels, sort of candylike.

(And another memory of mice: when I was a kid, there was a candy called, I think, Nice Mice. They came in a box about the size of the large Raisinets boxes. The "mice" were that sort of french-cream candy - kind of like the "Easter Mix" that you sometimes see, or those pumpkins they have at Hallowe'en - very sweet, very sugary. And the mice were pastels, kind of like the 1930s palette. I don't know if anyone else remembers those candies but I remember they were a big treat when I was a kid. I think they were kind of hard to find; I don't remember seeing them at many of the ordinary candy-purveying places I went to. I remember rarely getting a box of them as a treat, and eating them slowly, so I could enjoy them for a while).

Anyway. I know much has been made of "why" the 1930s colors and prints were developed when they were - that having prints of simple figures, with white-on-a-color (which most of the 30s prints I've seen are) is cheaper and doesn't require quite the same level of high-maintenance alignment of the different rollers in printing, and it requires fewer colors of dye. And the simple happy prints and sweet colors, it was suggested they were developed as a sort of simple antidote to the gloom and worry of the Depression.

I don't know about that - I suppose someone (Cultural Studies and Textile Studies being what they are) has done a thesis on the correlation between popular colors and designs in fabrics and the general mood of a nation. (And if that's true, what does the large proliferation of "vintage reproduction" prints, recalling everything from the 1820s to the 1970s, inclusive, say about the mood of the nation right now)? It seems perhaps a bit pat to me to say, "Fabric companies made pastel prints in the 1930s to counter the mood of gloom in the nation" or "Pastel prints were popular because they countered the feeling of hopelessness caused by the Depression."

(And for that matter: not everyone was affected equally by the Depression. Sure, there were a lot of people who lost their homes, or who had to pack everything up and head for Cal-I-For-Ni-A to try to make a new life, there were lots of people who stood on breadlines. But I suspect for people - like my great-grandparents - who had basically been subsistence farmers, the 1930s probably didn't bring much more change other than that maybe it was more likely that their customers bartered for their weekly ration of eggs or corn rather than paid cash...

And I suspect the people really hit hard by the Depression probably weren't buying much fabric, at least not beyond what was absolutely necessary to clothe the family.)

And yes, I know about feedsacks, and how often budget-minded women were able to get kitchen curtains or a dress for their daughter out of the material that chicken feed came in, but I think feed sacks and 1930s "little" prints are a bit different - all the feed sacks I've seen that were identifiable as such have larger prints and a more garish combination of colors, whereas the 1930s prints are little and generally limited in palette and seem generally more dainty than the feedsack prints.

(I wonder how many disagreements in couples started because the man didn't pay regard to getting all the feed in "matching" sacks - therefore leaving the woman with 3 separate yards of fabric, none of which was the same - or of the woman telling the man VERY SPECIFICALLY the colors she wanted, and his not being able to find them. Or of the clerks in the stores having to clamber over mountains of feed in sacks to find the four or five that were of the same pattern...)