The Patterns! Yay!

moonabarbuzza
Dec 12, 2018
2 min read

I can still remember being a 4 year old child back in the day, when most mothers knew how to sew, and very often, used to make their children's clothes. My mother was a master at sewing and following patterns with great precision. She had a whole box of them, most of which were gently worn out. Many of them were printed and used even before I was born, and those are what the topic of this blog is...

Going into my moms closet, I had two objectives; 1. to try on my mom's winter hats, and 2. to browse my mother's pattern collection. It wasn't so much of what was inside of the envelopes, as it was what was printed on the covers. Beautiful swan-like women, in pretty ultra feminine dresses; they looked so elegant, so confident, so chic.

A 4 year old may not have the most accurate perception of reality, and I was no exception. Those illustrations on the pattern covers were my means of escape, into a world of perfection; I very badly wanted to jump into their world, and be one of them. I could gawk at those illustrations for hours, in fact, whenever we would go to the pattern department at K-Mart, I'd stand on a stool and look at giant Butterick or Simplicity pattern books,which were my mother's babysitters while she shopped. Nothing could pull me from them. I was HOOKED.

As I got a bit older, I was still just as intrigued by the vintage patterns, however, rather than wanting to be in the dainty world of those gorgeous women, I wanted to draw them.

To this day, my heart skips a beat whenever I come across one of these old patterns from the early 60s. They still give me the same emotions as when I was a kid of four!