My 1938 Simplicity Catalog - Equal Parts Sad and Beautiful...

Hello all,
Today for your enjoyment I have more photos from my 1938 Simplicity store counter catalog.
This is the first vintage catalog I ever purchased, and I was delighted to find that it helped me accurately date my Simplicity S-Series sewing patterns.

More importantly though, it has also become a fascinating and sometimes personal glimpse into the mind of one of its previous owners. The lady who had it starting in 1939 used this big, heavy ungainly tome as a recipe book and war-time journal!
Beautiful page after beautiful page is peppered with recipes, articles, and jokes pasted over stunning illustrations and written over with notes like the following...

"1944 December 21. Thursday A.M. 11-20 o'clock. (So and so) has just stopped by on her way to the auction farm. She had been to the hospital to get a shot in the arm - I have just finished making the children some fruit divinity candy. It's so good. Must get the box packed and in the mail. How I wish they were home with me. ... God Bless them, and every soldier and sailor..."

As she is writing this blessing on her troops, the U.S. 101st Airborne and others are surrounded at Bastogne, fighting for their lives and cut off from supplies and reinforcements. This was part of one of the bloodiest battles of World War II, the Battle of the Bulge, where the U.S. alone lost 19,000 brave men, the allies nearly as many, and the Germans so many more.

It makes my heart break a little for her and every other woman who has ever waited for a troop to come home safely, no matter what side they were on, and reminds me how blessed I am that mine hasn't been called to an active war-zone yet.

Note, you can find an interesting looking recipe for old fashioned divinity candy here. I'm going to make some myself, sit in some warm sunshine, and hope that the box of candy made its way into the warm, safe hands of whoever she sent it to.

I'll just leave these here for you to read and enjoy without my commentary on the rest of them. Her notes are perfect enough all on their own.

Yes, yes it is!

We have previously talked about Simplicity 2229, featured above, in one of our Sew Expensive posts.

Bomb Girls

If you're not watching Bomb Girls yet, you should be.

The Canadian show is a beautifully put together drama about the women who bravely worked in one of several munitions factories to help the war effort during World War II.

Women heard the call in every country involved in World War II and rose above social restraints and convention to take the places of men who had gone on to fight.

Women diligently working in a Russian munitions factory.

In some countries, joining the work force was required, as in the UK's Land army. In other cases, it was voluntary, and many women caught hell from various detractors who thought it was more important to defend a woman's role as home-maker than it was to win a war against a violent aggressor.

Bomb girls does an amazing job of depicting not only the war effort, the stress these women were under to keep their men well armed, the worries they shared over sweethearts in harm's way, and gives a very good idea of what it was like to live and work during a war, with the rumor of possible invasion looming over their heads. (And the clothes aren't half bad either.)

But more importantly, what Bomb Girls does is shows how much many women welcomed the chance to work, how they valued their sudden independence, and how willing they were to hang on like hell to that independence after the men came home.

The poster above is a great illustration of the sudden power given to women to contribute to their countries as valued citizens.

This topic is particularly dear to my heart because my great grandmother, Ora, worked in a bomb factory herself during the war. Her middle finger was somehow smashed between two bombs. It healed straight and she was never able to bend it, but she still somehow managed to play the piano, straight finger and all. I remember my dad telling me that he thought it was so funny when he was little, she would make a fist, and her middle finger would still stick straight out. How I wish I could have met her.

Thank you to all the women who worked harder than we can imagine to fight the war in any way they could, and who paved the way for women to have the social and financial freedoms that many of us take for granted today.




You can watch bomb girls online here.