Hankies

What a relaxing weekend! the weather here was perfect. It was so cool, most of the bad mosquitoes were scarce.

Since I'm not crafting too much lately, here is a visit with one of my collections. I've been collecting vintage handkerchiefs for years. My mom gives me a little stack at almost every gifting opportunity. We find them at antique malls and they used to be had for about a dollar, but now they are more expensive.

My mom favors the ones with highly detailed thread crochet or tatted edgings.


I love those, but I have a soft spot for the printed ones. Particularly if they have unusual colors. Mostly I have florals or nature motifs and not so much of the ones that are tourist souvenirs, although those are great too.



Occasionally, Mom finds printed ones that have beautiful handstitched edges:


Once Mom hosted a bridal brunch for a close family on the bride's wedding day and we gave several beautiful hankies from my collection as favors for the bridal party and the groom's family who had traveled all the way to Chicago from Brazil for the event. The bride used a beautiful elaborate white one at the altar and has saved it as a pretty keepsake.

Here's the pile of scraps from some of the hankies I used in a quilt as a gift for my mom. It was very difficult to get up the courage to cut into them, but I managed and the quilt turned out cute.


I've clipped a lot of patterns and ideas for ways to use vintage hankies, but I hate to cut them up! This is only a small sample of my collection. I switch a few of them in and out of a couple of decorative places in the house, but mostly, they go into a beloved drawer that I browse through fairly regularly.

Polished Silver

Isn't polished silver pretty? The candlesticks are wedding gifts from my husband's sister and brother. I usually use them for Christmas, but they needed a polish and I only just got to it today. Back when we got married, I was sure I'd need a silver chafing dish. Boy, was I wrong! It does look pretty in the china cabinet!


Tomorrow night is our meeting of the Chicagoland Craft Collective! Donna is finally going to get to her ribbon flower craft and as usual, I'm bringing a pile of my Japanese books to share with the uninitiated. We always pass our crafts around and share tips about techniques. Most of us use the internet, so we always talk about the tech side of crafting too. Join us if you are close to the northwest suburbs of Chicago.

I still haven't been crafting. My son has his last Cub Scout Pinewood Derby this weekend. My husband is really a math and history guy, so I supervise the construction of the car. Ours is always disappointingly slow. Thank goodness, several years ago we discovered that the hardware store sells cars already carved so we just focus on painting it and getting the weight right. I'm told the key to speed is using graphite on the wheels, so this time we'll try that to see if we can get this thing slightly fast. There is also some trick to the weight distribution that we have not mastered. Wish us luck!

New Tea Pot

No one really gets my style quite like my mom. Mom picks out the perfect vintage things for my collection. I suppose this is from years and years of cruising the antique malls together. I rarely buy things because of my thrifty tendencies, but she finds lovely treasures.

Look at this spectacular tea set she gave me for Christmas:
The printing on the bottom just says "Japan".

It so happens that I've adored this style of pottery for many many years. My entire childhood and most of my adult life, our routine after Thanksgiving was to browse the antique stores in my parents hometown of Waterloo, Iowa. When I was a kid, I had a bit of birthday money saved and saw this round tea pot:

I absolutely fell in love and had to have it. I was just a young kid and my mom was totally skeptical and discouraged me from buying it. I showed her! My first vintage purchase has always been one of my very favorite things. It goes with my Fiestaware dishes too. Later, she found a tea cup and a platter in the same style.

American Girl even has a matching children's tea set which of course we got at the first opportunity for my daughter. She's served many tea parties with these adorable things.


That big platter was another gift from Mom. It has "Kitchen Kraft" printed on the bottom, but the round teapot is "Drip-o-Lator". I think this deco styled floral was used by many manufacturers. I don't see it that often.

As an aside, I absolutely recommend Fiestaware dishes, if they are your style. The are extremely chip resistant and durable. I am addicted to them and have 2 sets of almost every color they've made (except he dark ones). I am so in love with dishes that I change my Fiestaware for the seasons. We've had reds, greens and golds for the holidays and I'm about tho switch to pinks, oranges, and reds for Valentine's Day. In March, it's blues, yellows and green and in the summer I use all the brights. My husband thinks this is a little bit nuts, but it is a simple pleasure for me to have our meals on pretty colored dishes, and I like the way everything in the dish cupboard matches. (It distracts from the piles in the sink.)

Real Vintage Tea Towels

I still haven't figured out the settings on my camera. I went through my vintage linens drawer to photograph my tea towel collection. I LOVE these things.
First, These Days of the Week towels were done by my Grandma N:


She also did these adorable Sunbonnet girls. Up in the closet, Ihave a Sunbonnet Girl quilt stitched for me by my other Grandma McK.


I can't show vintage family embroidery without telling this tragic story. My dear mother-in-law was visiting us and we were talking about how great it feels to clear out the closets and give away things we never use. She said she finally, just the week before, gave the never-been-used days of the week tea towels stitched by her grandmother for her wedding day to the fundraiser rummage sale at the Basilica in Minneapolis. I couldn't temper my reaction. "You did WHAT? I collect those!" I would cherish something made by my daughter's great-great grandmother for her grandmother's wedding day... Dear Nana, mortified, went white and as soon as she got home, she tried to rescue them. Alas... I hope they raised lots of money for the poor! All is forgiven, Nana.. I'll stitch my own tea towels instead. Now I get all the handstitched family things.

Back to the towels. This adorable set was a gift from my Mom who knows exactly the sort of things I like. There is lots of cute blanket stitching on them. There must be 3 or 4 more towels in the pattern set, but this came with only these three:


Four actually, this one was with them and the fabric is a similar super soft linen:


I'm pretty sure these also were a Christmas gift from my Mom. I love the clumsy girl here. My Grandma N used to brag that she never ever broke anything her entire life. Dear Grandma... that is totally preposterous. Mom and I would always chuckle a little about this assertion.


Mom stitched these (or maybe Grandma N) I remember them, we had them out for years when I was a child:

Here's a detail. The vegetables are all cross-stitched:


This one is another family one. Mom used it for years before retiring it to the keepsake drawer. I love the use of rick-rack. It has a big yellow splotch right above the motif, unfortunately.


These are less interesting, but I did them when I was a teenager. We always visited my Grandparents in Iowa over Thanksgivings. Saturday after the feast was the day I'd do crafty things with my Grandma N. (Friday was shopping day with my Mom. I don't know what the guys did...) This particular year, Grandma taught me stenciling and I went crazy with it. I very quickly ran out of tea towels and raided my dad and brother's suitcases. My brother got a big elaborate stenciled Christmas Goose on his tidy whities and my dad got a little moon.


Finally, someone in the family is going to have to help me remember where these are from. They are possibly from an antique mall...

Hall Pottery at Mom's

Today it's a quick visit to my mom and dad's house. I need to take some better pictures... Mom always sets a beautiful dining table. She has always had red dishes, even when red wasn't trendy. These blue ceramics are part of her Hall pottery collection. She has a set of matching bowls and remembers eating from them as a child. I envy my mom's dining room that is usually available for dining. Ours is a sewing room, office most of the time and when we dine in there, I have to camouflage the piles of stuff I've cleared off the surface of the table.


In one of her dining room drawers is a most terrific collection of vintage thread crochet potholders and trivets. This one is made by someone's grandma out of bottlecaps. My mom uses it regularly and the other thread crochet potholders make great coasters. I've got to bring my camera over to my parents place sometime and take more pictures. She's got like 50 vintage beaded purses in their downstairs bathroom. One lovely cabinet is packed with Torquay Mottoware and Cottageware. She has a trunk full of feedsack fabrics and tablecloths. She collects vintage childrens books, particularly Basal Readers that predate Dick and Jane. Mom gives me hankies all the time, but has a drawer full of her own collection along with vintage embroidered pillowcases and lovely handtowels.

Here's my mom and dad around the time they were in college. They went to high school together, but my dad was a few years older and hadn't noticed my mom until he met her after his post college stint in the Navy. Mom was a waitress at Howard Johnson's earning spending money at the end of her last year of college. A mutual friend introduced them and Dad got Mom's phone number. She went to the drive-in with my dad and very quickly dumped her longtime boyfriend. Not long after, they moved to Chicago and have made a happy life there. They still go back to their hometown of Waterloo, Iowa. Mom just celebrated her 50th High School Reunion.

How does this blogging thing work.....

So this is my first attempt at a blog post.. it's sort of a test. This is the duckie mascot we made at my MeetUp group last night. I'm thinking of selling him as a little kit... stay tuned! (Although I doubt anyone is reading this....) My MeetUp is the Chicagoland Craft Collective and it is really great. I always get fired up about crafting when I get home. Sarah Moore is our fearless leader and a super crafter.

Lets see... on my blog I plan to share my crafty obsessions with like-minded people. It's also my dream to photograph all the vintage linens and hankies in my collections. Here's one that was my Mom's when she was a girl.


It's by artist Carl Tait and I remember peeking in her keepsake drawer when I was a kid and playing with it. I'd practice chanting the rhyme and wonder what it would be like to have those different jobs.

Here's another super cute one by that same artist:
I adore hankies and have been collecting them for quite some time. Most of my collection features florals and beautifully detailed crochet. My mom knows just what I like and always finds great ones for my collection at antique malls during her travels. Thanks, Mom! Someday I'll photograph the basket quilt I made for her from some of our hankie stash.

So I guess I finally made the leap into starting a blog.... now if I can just remember to use my punctuation and grammar like I should, I think it'll be okay.