Knitwear trends from the thirties

There is a 'new' magazine issue in my library: Eesti Naine (Estonian Woman) from January 1933. This is the oldest monthly women's magazine of Estonia, published almost continuously since 1924.
There are articles, essays and poetry in the magazine, but about a half of the contents is dedicated to home, fashion and crafts.

These lovely fitted and draped dresses are only a few examples from the collection of 60 outfits in the issue. There was no pattern sheet included, but anyone could order sewing patterns by mail, made to fit exactly to their size. Just send in your measurements and the money: 20-50 cents plus delivery costs 10 cents per pattern. Add a sketch, if you'd rather have a pattern for something that was not in the magazine. This system is probably not working anymore...







For knitting, there are some interesting designs, like this lace sweater in two colours:




Colourful striped sports sweater with matching scarf and hat:




Wool sweater to be knitted using two different stitch patterns or colours:



The schematics for this sweater looks like this (measurements in centimeters), that and the two explaining text sentences is all the pattern includes:




Crochet vest variations for him and for her with schematics (no stitch pattern, seam neckline and armholes with a single crochet row):






There was also an article about washing woollen garments that might contain some useful evergreen tips for us today:

How to wash a wool sweater without colour bleeds
To determine if a knitted garment is colourfast, wet a part of it in an unnoticeable place with cold water and then squeeze with white towel. When towel gets coloured, it is recommendable to only dry clean the garment. However, with care it can be washed at home as well.



Wet the sweater in cool rainwater, take it out and press out water. Then put the sweater quickly into cool soap foam and squeeze throughout. Use as many quick soap water baths as necessary to clean the sweater - until foam will not disappear.
Rinse in soft cool water. Add vinegar to the last rinse to fasten the colours. Squeeze dry and lay flat on a towel or sheet.



Drying is the most important part, garments get ruined mostly while drying. Insert clean towels in the pockets, under the sleeves and between front and back parts of the sweater. Roll it and press water firmly into the towel. Remove the wet towels, add new dry ones, and repeat the rolling for two more times.



Then lay the sweater flat and let dry on a new dry towel on a table or bed. It will dry fast now and excess water cannot make the colours bleed along the fibres. Do not dry in a too hot place like next to stove, that will make the sweater shrink. Do not hang the garment, as the water will flow to the bottom and make the colours bleed on the edges; besides, it will not dry evenly. When dry, the sweater can be ironed with cool temperatures.

Window shopping in Venlo

Craft shops are really hard to pass by, especially when there is a pile of yarns on the window. But as the saying goes, when travelling light, do not enter a yarn shop.
Here are some impressions of craft and souvenir shop displays in the small town of Venlo, the Netherlands.

Inspiration from around the world

My weekend trip to visit Floriade, World Horticultural Expo in the Netherlands, quite unexpectedly proved to be interesting craftwise as well. Many participating countries had included souvenirs and textiles in their expositions, for some it was the main attraction with very little to show in the gardening area.

This tree with a colourful knitted sweater was probably the only living creature on the fair grounds not suffering from the fierce cold wind and frequent rain and hail showers of the weekend:




Crafty hands could easily make a garden sculpture like this cyclist from Luxembourg



or any other decorative willow object:




Motive of a cosy knitted throw on a garden shed chair:




Bobbin lace samples of Sri Lanka



and how they are made by diligent hands:




Chinese silk lantern:




Fine printed fabrics of Indonesia:




Patterns from Afghanistan:




Colours of Tunisia:




Moroccan sofa with a beautiful patterned fabric in chocolate and turquoise:




Andean knits and textiles from Ecuador:




And some more pretty textile patterns with mystery origin:






Last but not least, some fashion ideas to steal from this performer's costume:

Easter eggs and chirpy chicks

My first food post: the Easter eggs have not been dyed yet, instead this year's chicks are extremely bright and colourful. And absolutely non-angry. On the contrary, they have very soft characters and big warm hearts inside.
Have a happy Easter!

Digital crafting

Wouldn't it be convenient to have all sorts of real life tools available also while being online? For example, scissors for cutting, glue for pasting, safety pins to put something on hold, pins for pinning?


I turned some of such tools and small craft related items into digital format. The images are free to use for embellishing your craft blog or website. These are .png files without background and will blend in anywhere.
To save an image, right-click on it and choose 'Save Image As' or similar.

All images are shown in actual size. They can be made to appear smaller by using the code marked in green inside the image tag in HTML and adjusting the width in pixels:
<img width="50px" src="http://..." />

If your default web template adds border to images, you can add this green code to the image tag to remove the border:
<img style="border: none; background: transparent;" width="50px" src="http://..." />