More vintage crafts

I got to thinking about this yesterday.

I looked up a little bit on Joan Russell. (She died in 1984, so sadly there's another person who played a big role in my childhood that I will never get to thank in person or by a letter). There are a few of her patterns up posted on line. (And yeah, the TINY little grids that you had to upsize the patterns from.....that's a forgotten skill, now, most of the books with shrunken patterns now direct you to photocopy it at whatever enlargement. Which raises the question - what if you live on a ranch in, say, Valentine, Nebraska, and the nearest location with an enlarging photocopier is an hour's drive away? I generally refuse to buy books, especially if the toys are meant to be small, where they shrink the patterns down aggressively and then tell you to photocopy).

I guess you could send off to Women's Day and for a small cost, get full sized patterns? I know her soft-toy book (which I have, and which has the Alice in Wonderland dolls in it) has all full sized patterns.

(And yes, you can always make the things smaller by not enlarging the pattern, I've done that. But sometimes publishers, and I think this is particularly unfair, will have the patterns designed to be enlarged to two different sizes! So, for example, the doll pattern tells you to enlarge it 200%, but the clothes patterns, which are smaller to begin with, only have to be enlarged 150%....)

I thought of other crafts we did.

I've been meaning to remark on "string art" - this is where you wind fine string (like crochet cotton) around a pattern of nails partly driven into a board, and it makes a sort of 3-D picture. I remember these from the 1970s. (They were also sometimes done with wire, I think a restaurant my family went to had a couple of sailing ships done in copper wire).

Well, it's back - I've seen kits for it at the JoAnn's. The funny thing is I had not even thought about that thing for years until I saw it for sale.

Latch hook kits are still around, but I don't think they ever left. (And I admit - I was thinking this morning, "I should get one and do it when I need to be doing something but have almost no concentration left" because they do take very little concentration to do.)

Macrame isn't really back, but I've seen some crochet patterns for plant-pot holders that mimic macrame, so I suppose it could come back.

Crewelwork, also - this used to be big in the 1970s and 80s, and was highly thought of. ("Kids and little old ladies" did latch hooking, the way the thinking went. But grown women did crewelwork, and possibly there was some kind of, not exactly conspicuous consumption, but signalling that "Look, I have the money to buy an elaborate and expensive kit, and enough free time to do it." Some of the more elaborate needlepoint, especially the petit point, was that way too).

And yeah, needlepoint - and in my town at least, there was a strong divide between the canvas and the plastic-canvas kind, with the kind on "cloth" canvas having the snob cachet and the plastic canvas kind being a little downmarket. (It's funny, isn't it, how people turn everything into a chance to "signal." Or at least it was that way where I grew up)

And again - I look at some of the kits that they sell in magazines like Victoria (which are very fancy and artistic) and think, "It might be kind of fun to do one of those" but I also recognize that I have no time for many things these days, and I don't need another hobby.

There were also kids' crafts. Makit and Bakit were big in my house, we had a lot of those "suncatcher" things - it was like a much simpler and kid-friendly version of stained glass, which was also a popular craft in the 1970s. (I knew lots of people with homemade versions of "Tiffany" swag lamps).

Also Shrinky Dinks were around - we never had any, and I don't know why now. I'm sure it couldn't be my parents objecting to the fumes from the cooking plastic, because Makit and Bakit makes similar fumes. (In fact, I think now they warn people who do lots of that stuff - or Sculpey - to get something like an inexpensive toaster oven and use that *exclusively* for the plasticky stuff).

And there were pom pom crafts. I saved up my money for a set of pom pom makers that allegedly you could use to make into things like stuffed toys. (I was disappointed - apparently the models were made with some kind of fluffy yarn, and using just standard worsted did not give the same results). And those flower-loom things you could use to make things kind of like a woven version of granny squares, for purses and coverlets.

And God's eyes, those were a big scouting craft, as I remember. (And I did them with my Youth Group once....)

Also, those flat-panel toys - where you could buy the panel, sew it up, and get a pillow-like toy kind of shaped like the animal or doll it represented - were big. I had several of these as a kid; my favorite was a giraffe I named George. (I also had a cat named Charlie and a bear named Bear.) They still make those sometimes; I have one I bought recently of a fox that I haven't made up yet, but intend to have as a pillow on my sofa. (Also, I think Spoonflower has quite a few of these, and some are much more elaborate, in that they work up into something three dimensional).

Sock monkeys were also still around, as were any kind of sock toy. (I think that Joan Russell book has instructions how to make a toy kitten out of a sock). And those pantyhose dolls, which can at times seem a bit creepy.

Decoupage kind of crossed age groups- kids did it but I remember some very sophisticated looking things done by grown ups. Again, this was a fairly simple craft and could repurpose things, like turning an old cigar box into a sewing kit by prettying it up and maybe putting a pincushion or something inside the cover.

Crafting kind of declined in the 80s, I suppose it was the cyclical nature of things and maybe after the frugal 1970s (where some crafts really were about making stuff cheaply, or at least feeling like you were eco-conscious because you were "recycling"). But I did find one craft that seems "so 80s it hurts" - Make Your Own Cassette Tape Holder.

(Cassette tapes are starting to come back, a little, too, because people are remembering how easy it was to make "mixtapes" on them. And perhaps there is a tiny bit of "vintagey" cachet, for those of a hipster mindset).