2024 Fashion On The Ration Challenge

potplant

For 2025 I'm aiming to go on retrieving clothes I put by (ages ago, some of them), altering/mending as required, and wearing them !  And sewing a dress or top or two from my rather large fabric stash. I think  - having started coupon counting late this year with buying a nice new pair of jeans - that I've just stayed within the limit, warm long underwear being my other new buy (and definitely worth it). 
Oh, and on the subject of parsley - it doesn't usually grow that well for me, but a couple of years ago I tried growing celeriac, which barely produced any root but did make masses of wonderfully healthy green leaves, which I happily used in soups, a good celery/parsley flavour.  Now I just plant it for the leaves!             
Best wishes to all for Christmas and 2025!

Nelliegrace

I was thinking about why we buy so many clothes. 

In the forties people were smaller and thinner, and were not likely to be putting on weight on the rations, so everything in the wardrobe would fit. Their mother and sisters’ clothes would fit and could be borrowed or passed on. 
I have clothes which I hope will fit again, and more that I hope it won’t be necessary to wear again because nothing else fits. There are clothes for best, clothes for scruffy, and lots in between, and in Britain, clothes for every season, and lots of waterproofs. 

Fashions changed then as now, but good clothes were expensive, an investment, made to last, looked after, repaired, darned, altered if necessary. Home made clothes were appreciated, we understood the skill and effort they involved. 
Purchase tax, limited production, and clothes rationing, all made buying clothes difficult. It was seen as patriotic, helping the war effort, to wear the same old coat year after year. A lot of women were in uniform. 

Now we have lots of cheap, imported clothes, synthetic fabrics which soon look scruffy, elastic fabrics which soon sag, and few people have the skill to keep clothes in good repair. When did we darn a pair of tights last? 

Laura_Elsewhere

@Nelliegrace - well, I used to darn tights, but then I switched to wearing very long over-the-knee cotton stockings and they are much more resilient so hardly ever need darning... 

For the first half or more of the C20th, one advantage was that fashions changed slowly and not too drastically, so your best skirt and jacket this year would eventually become your everyday skirt snd jacket, while the current everyday ones (which were your best when new, 5 years ago) are demoted to being old clothes for gardening or room-painting or whatever. you used hats, gloves, bags, scarves and other accessories to be fashionable, and your skirt and jacket, being made of good cloth with sensible seam allowances and not overlocked) could be made over if their cut was really too old-fashioned, by you if possible, but by a local affordable seamstress or tailor if not. 

My beloved independent yarn shops, Ewe & Ply, now run mending workshops to teach people how to darn, patch and reinforce, and they also offer a mending service by post if you have something you can't mend! I do love their attitude...

PipneyJane

potplant said:

For 2025 I'm aiming to go on retrieving clothes I put by (ages ago, some of them), altering/mending as required, and wearing them !  And sewing a dress or top or two from my rather large fabric stash…

You and me both, @potplant!  I have several items of clothing that don’t get worn, simply because they’ve been missing a button or two for longer than I care to admit.

The only things I’ll definitely need next year are t-shirts/tops to wear to work under my suit jacket.  I probably won’t need to buy another suit, since I can now fit into several that I bought years ago before putting on weight.  Once I’m certain I won’t get bigger again, I’ll take in the trousers and skirts on the larger sized suits.  (One bright side of being so ill a year ago.  I lost 2 stone in weight and went down to a size 12.)

Merry Christmas everyone.

- Pip

diminua

My plans for next year include a pair of black boots as my green suede ones are starting to wear badly. I've come to the conclusion it's the way I walk. I supinate, pushing out the upper on the widest part of the foot and creasing the zip (if there is one) over the inner ankle and knocking the teeth out of alignment - and eventually the upper parts company with the sole and the zip refuses to work (and if repaired, will go again). 
I have my eye on solovairs. Not cheap, but they have the advantage of no zip and thicker leather that will hopefully push back, and will be smart enough for work over the winter. 
 
I also want some trousers for work - either two black pairs or a black pair and a grey, as mine are now too loose on me. Ideally I'd want the same thing a size down, but that's a pipe dream. I'll have to see what's about.

Lastly a sports bra with spaghetti straps (so they don't look like bra straps and I can wear it under wide necked tops) but a cross back so they don't slide down my shoulders - like the boots I know this exists and which I want and even what colour I want, I'm just waiting for my coupons. 

I don't think I'll need anything else next year, but we'll see. 

Anyway Merry Christmas folks. 

Cherryfudge

Another five coupons spent - it was even a planned spend as I wanted a (few) lightweight Christmas top(s) and saw one in the sale today that I've ordered. I will be looking for more as I now have enough Christmas jumpers to wear them quite a lot through December and it's fun, but I'd like to have lighter things too.

My coupons are doing quite well this year so I have them to spend. @Nelliegrace, I hope 1941's restrictions don't get even more stringent. How must it have felt not knowing when rationing would come to an end?

I've also cut back on second hand buying this year, seeing as I always bring in more than I pass on. Last year I realised I had too many by far but I've only let a few go. Next year I hope to continue buying in much the same vein. I'm pleased with how my mending has saved lots of items, and even nicer is discovering I'm making a new mend next to an old mend that blended so well that I had completely forgotten it.

Good wishes for a lovely Christmas / Yule / Hanukkah / Kwanzaa one and all.  For those for whom this is a difficult time of year or a year to be left behind, spring is on its way.

PipneyJane

Afternoon All

Cup of tea?  Please help yourselves to a minced pie - they are my first ever attempt and have some apple grated in.  (One of Marguerite Patton’s wartime recipes.)

Has anyone else heard the rumour?  Flash Harry was telling me that Mr L!dler will have a black market supply of sock yarn from Sunday.  All the same colours as earlier in the year, 75% wool blend, for less than £5 per 2 skein/200g packet.

- Pip

Laura_Elsewhere

I'm resisting the lure of the black marketeers! What with replacing our furniture this year (bomb damage...) I have no realised what dreadfully vast quantities I have... 

(The new furniture is Mr E's son's teenage-bedroom Ikea pieces, great deep drawers, all very lovely and looks gorgeous with deep-red fronts... but then he discovered the drawers are designed only for clothes and so he can't store his tech or tools or other heavy things in there, so I have ended up with five huge double-depth drawers and three normnal-depth ones, all for my knitting wool! And, er, there's still some that won't go in.... ummm.... )

I have just cut out the midnight-blue velvet given to me by a friend (she was given lots of fabric in 2020 by a friend whose friend (are you keeping up with this?!) worked in costumes for a costume drama that was cancelled due to Covid and so all the fabric already bought was going into skips and the friend-of-the-friend-of-my-friend was literally climbing into skips and dragging it out...! She redistributed it beautifully and when my friend opened up her goodies, she saw this and thought I would love it... and I do! It's pure cotton, quite flexible, clearly upholstery but will work for a jacket, and the finest, tiniest needlecord wale I ever saw, and in a deep rich midnight blue...). I'm making a copy of a 1650s full-sleeved waistcoat jacket I made back in my re-enactment days... lined in cream short-fur fake-fur throw we bought 10 years ago to make Mr E's mother a tiny teddy bear!. 

I am going head-first at it over today and tomorrow  

I hope you all have a good Feast of Stephen! 

Nelliegrace

Thank you, @PipneyJane, I have checked the details and passed on the news to DD.
She has been to one of the Land Girl training centres and has been offered challenging work which she will enjoy. We are so pleased for her. 

I have sorted out a large bag of unworn, fleece jumpers for the local emergency food centre. They were long forgotten in a box.
The Times, October 1940, advised people to empty their attics because of the risk of fire bombs. When DH struggled on the attic ladder to get the container of Christmas cards down, he was so wobbly, that I think we need to clear everything out. He could have landed on me!

alicef

oh oh the temptation @PipneyJane!

I managed to resize and the OH was very pleased with his socks....