Tuesday, December 28, 2021

Vintage Recycling - a Cat Stocking Toy from 1940

 


For Christmas, I treated my self to a copy of Home Decoration With Fabric And Thread by Ruth Wyeth Spears, a popular newspaper dressmaking and craft columnist from the "between the wars" period and about whom there is precious little online.  Her books are worth getting your hands on just for the illustrations.

This is a "use it up, wear it out" project from a book published just after the Depression and with perhaps a foretaste of rationing.  I don't think you're going to be able to find a "size 9 tan cotton stocking" anymore, but you can make it from a baby sock and stuff it with catnip for your moggies.

It can be borrowed from that marvelous online compendium the OpenLibrary.

5 comments:

  1. I wonder if this would work for some ferals I need to round up? Mother insists on feeding them and they are just multiplying thanks to an outrageously large neighborhood Tom. I have baby socks thanks to the newest granddaughter and can get some catnip....hmmmmmm.

    These also make me think of the ever outrageous sock monkeys from the red heel socks, invented in 1953. My mom made one each for my brother and me a few years after that, about 1960 or so, lol.

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  2. Could use a Buster Brown cotton sock from the Vermont Country Store.

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  3. are you having issues with this in your area?
    https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/dec/28/american-red-cross-workers-describe-exploitative-conditions
    in my area, it's usually western wildland fires, so not so much of urban health.

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  4. The turnover in paid staff here is fairly high. The only Red Cross workers who enjoy a decent income are the ones married to people with good jobs.

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  5. Well - those and the very top echelons. Gail McGovern is paid something in the area of $500K which irks a lot of people.

    I say, we're paying for her skill set, and those don't grow on trees. It would be nice if the worker bees got at least decent benefits, though.

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