Loot from Norway

So long, long ago I blogged about hunting down my first Norwegian antique show. And then I didn't say another thing about it. Frankly, I forgot. I'm funny that way. But I did take pictures, which I just stumbled upon. So I thought, better late than never, n'est pas?
The show was small. Really small. I grew up at antique shows, tucked under a display table for a whole weekend with an engrossing book, or playing dress up for my mother's customer's entertainment. This was in Denver and the shows were always on a massive scale. This show was advertised to be the largest gathering of antique dealers in all of Norway, Sweden and Denmark combined.
Sadly, that wasn't much. The building with about 25 booths was about the size of your local small bowling alley.
Regardless, I still found some cute things whilst my husband carefully examined old German pistols and training grenades. I was hunting for patterns.
I didn't find any.
But what I did find was pretty great.

I got some lovely cards of little rhinestone buttons. There are tons of them for those lovely dresses that call for 16 or more buttons.

I especially love the gold double rosebud buttons. Oh, the things I can do with these.

I also acquired a great "Parisian" hairstyles booklet for salons in Norway from June of 1949, with advertisements in Norwegian and French which I find an odd blend, sort of like my life.

Lingrie leads to babies

I have been living in Norway for a year and a half now, with another 2 1/2 to go. The entire time we've been here I've been on the hunt for any trace of the seamstresses of 50 years ago. Allow me to explain. Sewing patterns never show up in thrift shops here. They all get thrown away. Sick, wrong, and horrible, I know. The only traces that anyone used to sew things for themselves is the occasional hand made dress popping up in a thrift shop from time to time.
I started to think for some reason that sewing things disappeared from Norway like the dinosaurs did in a mysteriously massive sewing cataclysm that wiped all traces of patterns out in one fell swoop. So I've been on a sort of pseudo-archeological hunt to track down the history of sewing in this mysterious land of the knitted sweater.

Today I had my first breakthrough. A tiny, dusty and dim antique shop that had a small stash of sewing patterns, and tucked haphazardly underneath that stash, were some of the most gorgeous sewing pattern catalogs from the 1940's I've ever seen. It's all in Norwegian, of course, but that's just a better incentive for me to pay more attention in my weekly Norwegian courses.
So for about $40 (dirt cheap by Norwegian standards) I bought it all up and raced home to carefully examine each page of my loot.

Can you say factory folds? Because I can.

 These sewing patterns were all in great shape, several of them in their original factory folds.

 I got a large bounty of ladies magazines from the 1940's and 1950's, some of which are packed full of knitting patterns, and great pattern advertisements.