Monday 10 June 2013

The Weather Outside is Never as Frightful as This


This pattern is the "Fur Trimmed Helmet and Mittens", and appeared in the Good Housekeeping Needlecraft, Fall-Winter 1973-74 issue. For those women who have decided that an unholy marriage of a fright wig and an argyle vest is a fetching winter look. Or who just want some random hunter to put them out of their misery by mistaking them for an elk.

Is it just me or were the craft ideas in the housekeeping-type magazines from the fifties through the seventies routinely horrible? It makes me wonder if maybe it wasn't some sort of stealth campaign on the part of Betty Friedan and her ilk to make frustrated housewives to look up from their magazines, pause in the middle of reaching for their next gin and tonic and Quaalude and say to themselves, "Screw this! If I can't find anything better to do than make ugly useless crap, I'm going to get a job/go to grad school/volunteer for a worthwhile cause/leave my husband for the pool boy." Because it seems to me that the sight of patterns like this, in a context that implied that they were actually a good and desirable use of my time, would propel me into a epiphany more searing and profound than any number of back-to-back readings of The Feminine Mystique.

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