About - Detail
Growing up on a rural farm in the 1950's.
My dad told me to go over and pretend I was holding up the boulder at a state park. I'm wearing the same outfit that I had on at the 1949 picnic so I know it was the same year.
A friend is scanning the negatives of my third and fourth grade teacher and he sent me this one. I'm sitting down in the front row next to my little brother. My other brother is standing at the left in the back row and my mother is the third from the left in the back row. I don't remember the day this was taken. There are younger siblings of some of the kids here so it must have been a party open to families of students. Here is a post where I'm showing the only other photo I have from this one room school.
When I was in 5th grade they built a large school for all the kids in 5 districts and there were all of 50 of kids in the new school. Since we had all come from one room schoolhouses this was a really big adventure. At the previous school there were only 3 girls, me and my 2 friends, one 2 years younger than me and one 3 years younger. We had this picture taken of us at the new school in 1951. I am the one in the middle.
Do you think they play such innocent simple games today as we did in 1949? The marshmallows are hanging from strings and we had to try to grab it with our mouth without using our hands. I suppose whoever did it first wins. I really don't remember the day that much. I was 8 and a half years old.
I am the last girl on the right in the jeans and peasant blouse. It looks like I already had big feet back then, LOL. My mother is the lady on the left of the 2 ladies standing up.
Here I am at 14, so innocent and child like. Would any 14 year olds wear saddle shoes and socks like those today? Back in the 1950's we were allowed to be children while we were young and we still turned out ok. In this picture I was at a 4-H award night and am holding my blue ribbon for the loaf of bread.
I came across this pattern from 1957. I made these aprons for my mother. Look at the size of the waistlines on the ladies.
These were a couple of the pillows from my daughter's room in the 1970s. I made dozens of the Holly Hobbie pillows and sold them to an antique store in the Chicago suburbs. I also did craft shows during the 1970s and 80s.
I finished going through all of my patterns, tossed a few, some will go out for the garage sale, but there were a few I couldn't part with. On the left is the first skirt I made at home after learning to sew in the 1954-55 home ec. class my freshman year. I used our treadle machine and made the view with the ruffle out of a red print. This pattern preceded printed patterns. There were just series of holes punched in the tissue for identification. The western shirt pattern was used many times for shirts for my dad. It is from 1956. On the right is my wedding dress pattern.
Q. How did you learn to sew?
A. I am self-taught at age _____.
Q. When did you make your first quilt?
A. In 1957 at age 17, my mother said, "Your cousin is going to have a baby. Could you make a quilt?" I said yes and began researching how with a McCalls Pattern.
Q. Prior to becoming an avid quilter, you had a variety of foundational experiece. What was your first job in sewing?
A. I worked as a Designer's Sample Maker at Kaufman Dress Factory. I made the sample garments for clothing designers.
I spent a few hours yesterday afternoon going through a hall closet. In one box were the paycheck stubs from my first job in 1958. I sewed for a designer at a dress factory. I started out at $1 and hour and worked up to $1.17 before I left for a higher paying job that I hated in an office.
This is my aunt, my grandma and 2 great grandmas. My aunt was born in 1910 so this photo was taken a few years after that.
This is my favorite photo of my dad. It was taken around 1950. That was about the time that he got into photography seriously, developing and printing his own photos.
This is a page from my 1955 4-H project book. This is why we sewed back then; it was cheaper than buying ready made clothes as well as they fit better. Even though it only cost me $3.47 to make that dress, my babysitting pay was 50 cents an hour so that took me 7 hours of work to earn the money. There was a page to list how many extra garments we had made that year and I made 15 extra ones. I had only learned to sew one year earlier. I spent most of my babysitting money on fabric.
There was also a box of clothes that I had made for my daughter in the mid 1960s. This little dress was made with the iron on transfer of blue dots for the smocking. This is one of 3 dresses with smocking.
We bought our very first house after 11 years of marriage in 1972. This is the bedspread that I made for my daughter's very pink bedroom.
Like the old fashioned bedspreads, it has a quilted part that covers the top of the mattress and fabric gathered on the sides hanging to the floor. You can't see it here but it has a row of eyelet with ribbon woven through it at the bottom. It is dotted swiss fabric, with the dots starting to disappear.
A lot of my readers are knitters and I used to be one too. Back in the 1950s and '60s the most popular needlework magazine was McCall's Needlework and Crafts. My mother had a subscription to it because she liked to do crafts. I got my own subscription after I was married and got a lot of my patterns and advice for quilting and knitting in them. A few other crafty magazines started up in the early '60s and the little sweater above was in one of them. It may have been in a Workbasket magazine. I knitted it for my son in 1961 or 1962. 4 ply knitting worsted was the most popular yarn of that time period. This is the only sweater I kept. I passed the rest on to other little ones as my kids out grew them.