2024 Fashion On The Ration Challenge

Laura_Elsewhere

PipneyJane said:

Patrick’s writings chime with the dead-tree book that I’m reading: “Private Battles, How The War Almost Defeated Us” by Simon Garfield, a collection of Mass Observation Project diaries from 1941-1945.  I’m just at the point (sometime in 1943), when the Beveridge Report was released.  The general reception is positive, although one contributor, Edward Stebbing, complains that the workers will have to pay for it, not the rich.  

Another contributor, Ernest Van Someren, had an article about his family’s budget published in Housewife magazine, at the end of April 1942.  I can see contact with the British Library in my future, in an effort to track down a copy.  I’m assuming they’ll have it on microfilm, since nothing turns up on Web searches.  (One thing that did turn up was an American paper on their home front, The Housewife Enlists, from 1943.  I’ve downloaded it, but not read it yet.)

- Pip

Delighted to hear your stay at the Cottage Hospital went so well, and that you enjoyed the local Cricket Club derby! 

I've checked Gran's copies of The Housewife magazine, but unfortunately they are March 1945, Jan 1949 and March 1950, and no mention in the Contents listing of budget articles. 

Simon Garfield's three books on the M.O. project are wonderful- a less thrillingly-written but very useful book is Living Through the Blitz, published back in the 1980s by Harrisson who was the first to really analyse the archive to any degree. It had sat there for thirty years gathering dust and almost thrown out... 
Bear in mind when hunting for the Housewife article that the names used by Garfield are nom-de-plumes- you can work out who Maggie Joy Blount is, from what she says about her writing. I like the research scientist chap- he comes across as a nice chap to live next door to and I rather think he was a wonderful father too! 

We are turning the flat upside-down next weekend, the next stage in clawing back a useful sitting-room from the storage unit it had become. Mr E found someone who very seriously collects old Apple Mac kit, so on Friday we drove our heavily-laden car to meet him, and his gigantic new shiny huge Volvo estate car was absolutely filled, even to the front seat (it was quite funny because he couldn't work out how Mr E had fitted it all into our modest car- of course, Mr E is a geometry genius and had spent over two hours tessellating it all in). 

We have had all of that loose in the tiny flat for a fortnight as Mr E worked his way through, identifying specific models, cataloguing software and removing all his stuff from hard drives, etc... it's nice to be able to walk through doorways again instead of edging through sideways breathing in! Still no actual floor, only a walkway across the room, but we WILL get there. 
Today we are going through ALL my needlework projects, boxes and boxes of half-done, not-started, intended, needing-altered... and being ruthless about whether I will actually ever do X or Y, whether I'd wear A or B... 

PipneyJane

@Sarahspangles from my experience, that Rowan Cotton DK is horrible to work with.  It’s like knitting/crocheting with string!  In my case, pale pearly-pink string, purchased in John Lewis in Reading in 2006, chosen for the colour.  I started knitting a lacy jumper, decided it was totally the wrong thing to work with and it’s been in timeout, ever since.  I think I’ve found a suitable pattern to use - this time crochet - but never got around to it.

Sarahspangles said:

Sarahspangles said:

@PipneyJane I hope you made the cricket.

We crossed in the post, I see you did!

It amused me this morning to get an update from my DS, 24. I think a couple of generations earlier he might have ended up at Bletchley, though possibly overseeing men in overalls with tiny spanners rather than piloting a desk. He does work in a Cambridge building that has a real Cold War shelter in the basement.

Anyway, he sent a snap of himself presenting at a conference in Cologne, apparently in a basement, although I’m sure the exposed brick walls are a design choice. I’m proud of him as he’s rather shy and I know he was very anxious beforehand. The amusing bit is that before the trip he was sat down by the company lawyers and given guidance on not letting any mission critical secrets out. At the last conference he was approached by someone Chinese, with very odd questions, so it seems to be a genuine risk. Nothing really changes….

I’m 99% certain that I have a friend at that conference!  Small world.  I also have an old friend who lectures in Mechanical Engineering at Cambridge, someone I used to sing with in Australia.  Didn’t know he was over here, until he turned up on a documentary about WW2 weaponry, about a decade ago.  I was pottering around, thought “I know that voice!” and it turned out to be him.

- Pip

Laura_Elsewhere

I must sort out my coupons in my signature- I've bought six 25g balls of silk/alpaca to knit myself a short-sleeved cardigan in a vivid dark green, because the one I knitted last year I have absolutely lived in but because it's acrylic mohair that someone passed on to me, I can't actually wear it outside the flat, nor if I'm doing any housework- I kind of wear it for pottering or for going out to sit in a pub having a meal, etc.- but because it's essentially wrapping me in 100% plastic, I just start sweating horribly!! 
So although this is a less bright shade of green, it's still a good rich vivid one, and it's natural fibres so it will be FAR more wearable... the friend I taught to knit over Zoom wants to knit herself one, so we will knit them together over online sessions, which will be nice  

I am almost at the divide for sleeves-and-body on my leaf-green-and-cream cardigan. Stripes of two-rounds' width in green and cream, with a band just below the divide of all-green with the owls from the Kate Davies pattern, with little green mother-of-pearl buttons sewn on for eyes, then stripes again below for the body; the long waist-ribbing, cuff-ribbing and button-bands and neck-band all in green. 

I have also bought two balls from a Rav de-stash of a glorious periwinkle-blue bulky yarn- I love the shade and have a cap-sleeved cardigan in it but wanted a short-sleeved one and couldn't quite work out how to make my remaining yarn go that far, so spotting these two balls is ace (it's discontinued, of course...). 

I am now actively working to make the cardis and jumpers I actually want, in the sizes and colours and fibres I want. 

And starting to sew a little again. After next weekend, the sewing machine will be back by the window once more, and with clear space around it, so we both hope that means I can sew...

Sarahspangles

@Laura_Elsewhere Oh well, if we’re confessing to yarn purchases, I’ve bought some 4ply merino/cashmere/nylon sock yarn in a greeny blue for a cowl, and some lace weight merino/silk in ‘Mulled Wine’ for a wrap… but I’m not counting them until I make them. I needed something to look forward to after all the cotton.

I like your tactic of replacing things you’ve actually worn, the last time I did a lot of knitting (early 2010s) I succumbed to the lure of a couple of beautiful finished objects on Ravelry, made a version of them and then realised they weren’t really items I would wear. This time I have started out with minimal stash and needle sizes because I donated the rest during the pandemic. I’m now aiming to only make things in 4ply or finer. Jared Flood/Brooklyn Tweed was very in vogue in 2010 but I now see that the NY climate dictates you need much warmer clothing than we do here. Ditto most of Elizabeth Zimmermann’s classics.

When I’m home alone I like to have books and podcasts on in the background. This week I’ve started listening to Patty Lyons’ Knit On, on Youtube.  It started as Quarantine Live in 2020 and the first few are more about the difficult times we were all facing than knitting. Those were quite emotional to listen to. But after a few, now she’s got the tech fixed and friends have started to join her, they’re good. I don’t need to look at the screen until she’s showing techniques.

One of the nuggets which I think I’ll try is to write down and put with the skein(s) what the yarn was bought for, and maybe even put the pattern with the yarn. Because even though I have minimal stash there are a couple of ‘What was I thinking?’ skeins in there from my last flirtation with knitting. Another, for bigger projects, is to label skeins 1 of 7, 2 of 7…. so that if they aren’t all in your project bag, you know in advance when doom is impending!

Sarahspangles

PipneyJane said:

@Sarahspangles from my experience, that Rowan Cotton DK is horrible to work with.  It’s like knitting/crocheting with string! 

I’m 99% certain that I have a friend at that conference!  Small world.  I also have an old friend who lectures in Mechanical Engineering at Cambridge, someone I used to sing with in Australia.  Didn’t know he was over here, until he turned up on a documentary about WW2 weaponry, about a decade ago.  I was pottering around, thought “I know that voice!” and it turned out to be him.

- Pip

Yep, it’s string. It’s the Summerlite which is supposedly soft but I keep having to use hand cream. It’s making me rethink whether I’ll ever try linen yarn. Because it has no give, and I’m striping with it, every time I catch the tails at changeover it looks fine for a row and then an end pops through. I’m probably going to have to split it and weave it in for the last inch. About 90 times. DD better wear it!

DS loved the Cambridge environment - the town - when he went for interview and the job is perfect for him. But the company’s links to the University are mostly at Board level so his world is people he works with, mostly virtually and then going home to a shared house with constant turnover of housemates and effectively being a ‘tourist’ in his free time, with the colleges behind closed gates. He’s not settled, seems to travel to London a lot to see friends from school days and go to gigs. I’m sure he’ll work out a modus vivendi in the end. DD is a couple of years older but more outgoing and very happy in a shared house in a Yorkshire university city. I’m not really worried about either of them other than that low level ‘I hope they’re happy’ way.

diminua

Hi @PipneyJane,
glad to hear you're ok and got out to the cricket.

I have no spends to declare but do need to get some kind of patch for a long black broderie anglaise skirt I caught on a broken wicker basket. There's a haberdasher and sewing machine place in Tooting I'm sure will have something suitable.

In the meantime I thought people might like enjoy this snippet from Mollie Panter-Downes London War Notes;

June 1 1941
..the Whitsun Weekend doesn't seem much like a holiday, although banks will be closed as usual on Monday, unless, in the stately official phrase 'anything unforeseen occurs.' Actually, something unforeseen to the public was sprung this morning when the President of the Board of Trade came on the air to announce the imminent rationing of clothes, thereby ruining the Sunday-breakfast appetites of millions of women who regretted not having bought that little outfit they'd dithered about the other day.

Sixty-six coupons are to be the basic ration for twelve months, no matter where you shop, which sounds all right until you realise that you must fork out, for example, seven coupons just for a washable frock and five for a sweater. To get a pair of pants, a man will have to turn in eight; if he's a Scot and fancies a kilt, he need part with only six.

It was prosaically announced that the spare page of margarine coupons in the Englishman's food-ration book is to be used for clothing until the authorities get around to issuing separate clothing books, which should give couturiers an elegant shudder. 

Page breaks mine because it's a wall of text in the book. 

MPD wrote her 'Letter from London' for an American audience (the New Yorker) and goes on to talk about small businesses potentially going bust, and the risk of things being sold under the counter, which I'm not sure would have been OK for a British publication at the time. 

Laura_Elsewhere

How interesting, @diminua! Thankyou for that. 

PollyWollyDoodle

@Laura_Elsewhere my sister has a vast collection of cross-stitch kits.  I got her to go through them and say which ones she would do tomorrow, if she didn’t have any other projects on the go (an unlikely circumstance!). 

I took away any that didn’t immediately spark joy, and I’ve successfully sold almost all of them for her on V*nted.  It’s very easy to do, the buyer pays the postage, and they were easy to send as they mostly fit in a large envelope. 

Congratulations on finding a new home for the computer stuff, that must’ve made a difference in your flat!  

MrsCD

Pleased you got to the cricket, @PipneyJane! I looked for you on the telly! Also pleased that your treatment went so well they let you out in time to go. 😊

PipneyJane

Laura_Elsewhere said:

PipneyJane said:

Patrick’s writings chime with the dead-tree book that I’m reading: “Private Battles, How The War Almost Defeated Us” by Simon Garfield, a collection of Mass Observation Project diaries from 1941-1945.  I’m just at the point (sometime in 1943), when the Beveridge Report was released.  The general reception is positive, although one contributor, Edward Stebbing, complains that the workers will have to pay for it, not the rich.  

Another contributor, Ernest Van Someren, had an article about his family’s budget published in Housewife magazine, at the end of April 1942.  I can see contact with the British Library in my future, in an effort to track down a copy.  I’m assuming they’ll have it on microfilm, since nothing turns up on Web searches.  (One thing that did turn up was an American paper on their home front, The Housewife Enlists, from 1943.  I’ve downloaded it, but not read it yet.)

- Pip

Delighted to hear your stay at the Cottage Hospital went so well, and that you enjoyed the local Cricket Club derby! 

I've checked Gran's copies of The Housewife magazine, but unfortunately they are March 1945, Jan 1949 and March 1950, and no mention in the Contents listing of budget articles. 

Simon Garfield's three books on the M.O. project are wonderful- a less thrillingly-written but very useful book is Living Through the Blitz, published back in the 1980s by Harrisson who was the first to really analyse the archive to any degree. It had sat there for thirty years gathering dust and almost thrown out... 
Bear in mind when hunting for the Housewife article that the names used by Garfield are nom-de-plumes- you can work out who Maggie Joy Blount is, from what she says about her writing. I like the research scientist chap- he comes across as a nice chap to live next door to and I rather think he was a wonderful father too! 

Yes, and no.  In the introduction of Private Battles, Garfield specifically states “Their agreement with the founders of Mass-Observation and its trusties specified that their work would be used as they saw fit and fair, and their identity would be protected.  As with the first two books, this arrangement has been upheld (with the deception of Edward Stebbing and Ernest van Someren whose sons kindly agreed to the use of their real names).”

I’ve not worked out who Maggie Joy Blount is.  Do tell!  Ironically, where I work is on the Burnham Road about a mile from the village.  It’s not safe to walk into the village, but I may drive around one evening, before it gets too dark.

Also, well done re clearing out the flat.  I seriously need to do something similar, finding homes for the “stuff” that is just lying around.

@diminua, I had not heard of Mollie Panter-Downes.  Another book added to my Amazon basket, to buy later. 

Possibly as the result of reading “Stuff”, I’ve been thinking about capsule wardrobes.  Since I’ve mainly worked in professional consultancies, I have multiple capsules built around work suits.  The trick is make things look like a new outfit, while not changing many of the components.  Another thing is avoid loud fabrics for your basics.  Nobody remembers your grey suit, but they will remember the green one that I saw in M&S yesterday.  (It wasn’t even a nice shade of green.). I may work this into a longer post, later on.

- Pip