Recently I inherited my mum’s collection of craft books. My favourite is the Golden Hands Encyclopedia of CraftS -with the word “crafts” printed in a stencil font.
They were published by Marshall Cavendish Ltd in the mid - late seventies and arrived in weekly instalments. There was always great excitement in our house on a Friday when Mum had gone “up the street” to do her shopping. This was a once a week epic journey on foot for mum which involved stopping and chatting with everyone she came across and often took all day, walking up the longest main street for a small town in Australia - yep! What a claim to fame our town had. Long and skinny like a stretched out piece of elastic. Mum would return with the much anticipated craft magazine. We poured over each edition. Later we would spend evenings flicking through past copies, all collected into folders. Well - we lived in the country. Not much to do...
Before I packed the books into a box and brought them home from Mum’s, we took a trip down memory highway looking through the volumes, usually collapsing into waves of laughter at some of the ridiculous and ugly crafts on offer! The funniest part being that Mum would say, “Oh yes I made that.” Quite dead pan and serious!
Over the weeks I’ll share some of the funnier things – crafts to be avoided – as well as some of the lovelier images for inspiration – crafts from the past. The books also had a weekly chapter on recycling and money saving craft! Mind you if I look through these books much more I might get a page boy hair cut and start wearing William Morris fabric smocks... in fact...I found a pattern for that on page 820!
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| smock made from head scarves |
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