Vintage Acquisitions

My first encounter with anything vintage (Chevys aside) was at a very young age though I can't remember the exact number.  I was vacationing at my great-grandmother's house in Central Cuba, as I usually did in the summer.  One day I came across a very old magazine.  It was definitely like nothing I had ever seen in my very short years and I was fascinated by it.  I love the hairstyles, the clothes, the look of the advertisements.  I was just fascinated.  I remember reading the date on one of the adverts (I guess it was after the 1st grade after all) and thinking that it was amazing for a magazine to have lasted that long.  I cannot remember the specific date but it was some time in the 1940s.  I begged my great grandmother to let me keep the magazine and she obliged.  I treasured it until I left Cuba less than a decade later and have not seen it since.

My paternal grandmother, who had lived in Havana since she left her provincial town in her youth, had countless photographs of herself, her sisters and friends from the 30s, 40s, 50s, etc.  I LOVED looking at those pictures and just admiring their beauty.  Ever since I have thought that women back then were much prettier than women these days but of course, this is all a matter of preference LOL.  I just loved the style of the era and it's inarguable that they were far more stylish and elegant than we are today.  Perhaps that's why that era appeals to me so much.  Here is a picture of my grandmother circa 1945.

Anyhow, that's just a bit of background about how I came to love everything vintage.  These days I own several vintage photo cameras in full working order (one of them is 100 years old!), vintage cookbooks, etc.  My most recent vintage acquisition was two lots of 1940s and early 1950s patterns.  There are 40 patterns in total and only one is repeated.  I love them all.  I am not sure the styles would work on me at this point in time but I am hopeful that I will be able to pull them off at some point.

I almost wanted to wear brand new, white gloves to touch these patterns LOL.  I did not want to damage them.  I guess I'm just a curator/historian at heart HA!  A lot of these patterns are actually factory folded.  They have never been used.  How does a pattern make it through 60 years without ever being so much as unfolded?  It baffles me but then again, I wonder how many of my modern patterns I will even unfold in life.  The coolest part was finding a receipt for purchased fabric in one of the patterns.  The receipt is dated 3/8/1947 and is for 3 yards of fabric from a store in Ohio.  That made my night, just like finding hand written notes on vintage cookbooks makes me happy.

Here are some of my favorite patterns from these two lots.  You can see the rest on my Flickr set.

This is the pattern with the receipt.