Vintage Sewing Books

 If I could give one piece of advice to anyone expecting their first child, it would be to buy everything you can gender neutral. Yeah, have some cute little boy or little girl outfits, but for the most part, just stick with neutral stuff. Why? Because when you have your second baby, you probably won't have as much money to blow. It's easier if they can just wear the older kid's hand me downs and cheaper too.

 That's why there's not been much from me lately. Our new baby is going to be a girl, which is great. I don't really care that much, I'm just hoping that it's normal human sized. But almost all of our baby clothes scream "BOY!" I was working a lot more when I was pregnant with the Giant Baby, and didn't have to worry about things like paying for daycare and hearing specialists for a two year old. So at the end of the week, jumping online and spending two hundred dollars on ridiculous baby clothes, that'd only be worn once, and just end up covered in bodily fluids anyway, wasn't a big deal. But over the last few months, all of our spare cash has been eaten up with various medical expenses. Not anything dramatic, just doctor's visits, the kid's hearing specialist, and because I forgot to book my ultrasounds until the last minute, I couldn't get into either of the public hospitals in our area for them (which would have been free) and had to pay to have them somewhere else. And so right now our focus is on how to afford the things we're going to absolutely need, rather than pretty things to wear.

 Luckily, I'm a crazy hoarder, mad-person, with boxes and boxes of fabric stash and a big box filled with vintage sewing books. So I've been baby sewing. I'm pretty sure that's not a proper sentence, though. Except, the books I have, mean you have to rule and draw up your own patterns, which is tedious and time consuming, so two days work may only have some weird looking diagrams as their result. (It also means I have a lot of trouble focusing. My attention span sucks, and there's a pretty slim chance of me still being interested enough to make anything by the time I've finished ruling up the pattern.) It's also a bit confusing because some patterns include seam allowances, but most don't and which ones do is completely and utterly random. But most have an allowance on the pattern for a hem which seems odd to me. Why have an allowance for a hem but not seam allowances? Which means I have to pay attention more than I'd like.

 So far I've finished one dress, and I even learned to make buttonholes to do it!

It's not perfect. I used a sort of shirring tape on the front, that I really don't know how to describe. It kind of automatically shirs the fabric for you. And I hadn't practiced using it at all, so the very top little bit of shirring came out a bit wonky. Then I realised I could only stitch every second line and the rest turned out much better.  More concerningly, I actually have no idea what size it is! The book describes it as Infant sized. But that could mean almost anything under a year old. But also, in all honesty, the books I'm using are really inconsistent on sizing anyway.

  I'm making another dress from the same pattern that'll be more like the sample picture, with smocking and everything. No, I don't know how to do smocking, but there's a two page spread in the book that explains it, and it's such a small amount, that I think I can probably do it. Or at least cry and swear a lot trying.

I'm also making this raglan dress in red, printed flannelette with a white yoke -

That one's nearly finished. It just needs hemming, buttonholes and buttons.

I also want to make a few of these -

This is one of the ones that's inconsistent on size. Here it's listed as for 6-18 months (which sounds like a BIG size difference to me) but in other editions it's listed as 1-9 months or 3-12 months with the exact same measurements.

 These magazines are one of my favourite sewing resources. Not so much for the patterns, since I'm rarely sewing for humans, but for the advice on how to do things, or how to adapt a basic pattern into other things.

 These are just some of the ones I have that still have covers. Since they were printed more as magazines than books and were over thirty years old before I got my hands on them, most of them are missing their covers. Some are missing pages but some look like they were bought and never even used.

  They were written by a lady named Enid Gilchrist and published in Australia, first by the Argus newspaper (which is The Age now) in the 1940's, then by an Australian women's magazine called New Idea, until the 1980's. The 1980's ones are embarrassingly awful though. The two I have, from that period, have all the samples badly made, apparently by someone that hates sewing and children and clothes, in incredibly heavy, knit fabrics that hang in an awful, droopy way that make me think "No wonder they stopped making these books!"

 One of the things I love about these is the pictures of the clothes and how they changed over time. The earlier books have pages and pages of a million different styles of petticoats and gorgeous, snazzy, tailored, woolen coats. And the clothes are almost ridiculously formal.

  Both these outfits were suggested as easy clothes for holidays. And not holidays like Christmas or Easter, but holidays as in a week's vacation at the beach! I do not like ironing enough to even vaguely think clothes like that as play clothes is a good idea! And the little boy's shirt, looks like a pillowcase with a collar.

  And some of the books have some amazingly, camp clothes!

 That little boy doesn't look like he's feeling as groovy as his tie would suggest! Maybe because his shorts are painfully short!

This cover is so bright it makes my eyes bleed!

I'm pretty sure the girl on the left is holding the middle child down so she doesn't run away to change her clothes!

But that book does have some nice clothes in it

The little dress in the bottom left hand corner could probably still be worn by a four or five year old without anyone raising an eyebrow. (It says cover dress, but it's not on the cover of this edition. The military style one at the top was the cover dress on an earlier printing. In a painfully bright shade of pink!)

 It's weird to think that the kids in these pictures would be in their sixties now!
 Something interesting I have noticed is the ways the sewing tips changed. In the earlier books the tips are things like "How to adapt a standard bodice pattern to make a princess line dress" or "How to smock". Whereas the later books have tips that are at a very basic, beginner level. For example - "Be careful to remember to reverse the sleeve pattern before cutting the second sleeve, or you'll end up with two sleeves for the same armhole." Apparently they assumed everyone in the 1940's knew the basics of sewing but had lost faith by the 1970's!

 The ads are fun too. There are a lot that feature "moody" and "sluggish" teenagers, that immediately perk up after being dosed with laxatives! That'd perk me up too, but probably make me moodier. And almost all of the early ones have an ad for something called Curlypet, which supposedly makes your child's hair go curly!

 I'm very dubious that that would have worked. But can picture swathes of mother's handing over buckets of cash in the hopes of turning their straight haired darlings into little Shirley Temple moppets. I also can't help but wonder what it was and if there was any science behind it at all.

Anyway here's a fairly random selection of outfits.

 
Nine year old me would have loved this tartan dress! Grown up me, shudders at the thought of ironing it!

  This is about as casual as the girl's patterns got in the 1950's!

  I actually love this. I picture it as being a deep, dark blue, with pale blue ribbon and would be heartbroken if I found out it wasn't! But I cannot picture a modern child wearing any kind of adaptation of this.

  This reminds me of Buffy from A Family Affair. You can't see it in this picture but under the bolero, her pinafore has huge, brass buckles on the shoulders, which may be why she looks so uncomfortable.

  Another late 1960's, early 1970's gem! I love this, but could never inflict it on a real life child. And you can tell, just by looking at it, that that is some swelteringly hot polyester!

  I would probably force a child to wear this though. . . I'd possibly insist on it being a tiny bit longer though.

  This is one of my favourites. I imagine it being bright red. Although the kid in the picture looks a little freaked out, like she's not sure if she should run away or not. Possibly she's just scared of that terrifying, angry doll. Somewhere I have another book that actually has the pattern for the dress the doll is wearing too.

 Now I'm going to have to tear myself away and force myself to hem the red dress, even if hemming is tedious, so I can actually pretend I got something done today.