January Jumpstart Day Five

The best pencil box ever

This is the most amazing pencil box, ever.  It has a useful easel and three drawers with lots of partitions and little locks on the side.  If I needed to I could lock everything down, grab it by the handle and go.

vintage books and vintage sewing patterns

I've posted these books and sewing patterns on mariemeyer.etsy.com   A 1963 fishing book with amazing illsutrations including color fly fishing lure plates and knot tying.  

Then there is the McCall 7302 sport dress from 1948, of which I made the skirt once and loved it.  It can be very hard to find those patterns in the larger sizes of today - and this one is bust size 38.  

And Simplicity 6824 girls size 7 wardrobe which has a wonderful pants pattern, that can be made into shorts, and a short or long sleeved shirt.


We read this Total Money Makeover together last summer and it had a lot of really good information. 

Did some little paint sketches tonight on some loose hexagon tiles

crochet and drawings

strawberry ice cream and cake.. maybe.  the two color mix I'm doing with a cone of red yarn and the shiny tan yarn is a little like a christmas sugar cookie with red sprinkles...

I couldn't find any more of the off-white yarn at either store, so now I've got to decide to break up the pattern or continue with the white and have just that one area with the off-white... I'm thinking I'm going to mix the white and the tan yarn together there and then do it again on the other side, and that will allow me to do something else 'on both sides' that is alike as well... maybe pink mixed with the tan after that.  I was roaring along did all of what you see here in one day and then I came to a standstill because I wasn't sure how to proceed or if I should rip out.

The tan yarn in the big skein is part Alpaca.. from an old cache of statsh yarn.

 study of a cat that won't sit still - slightly abstracted

 drawing a memory of the 1940s house with the barrel stove and the brick wall... I will have to do from another angle so I can get the German wooden cuckoo clock above the chair by the window to the right of all of this.

1936 French book, signed by Eileen Fealy and her entire class, perhaps from Wittenberg University, Springfield Ohio?

French 'secondary school' reading book for classroom work.
'Sans Familie', par Hector Malot, Edited with Notes, Exercises, and Vocabulary by Albert L. Cru published by the John C. Winston Company, 1934

Dated inside October 9, 1936 'Eileen Fealy', and signed in front (and back) covers by her classmates/students?

I collect French and German books and primers when I find them for not too much money, and delight in reading them.  This one came to me several years ago through a library sale.  The librarian told me it had been donated to a local language group that now no longer used the library, and had donated their collection to be sold in the bookstore.  I didn't look at the signatures a lot then - and have read bits of the book here and there to improve my translation skills.  Last night, I recognized that there were two sets of names in the book that shared last names 'Clarke' and 'Click' - and Mark said, 'That will probably let you narrow that book down to exactly where it was used, what high school, in what town.'  That was an interesting challenge, and a mystery... and I began to look to see if I could identify anything more of the origin of the book I had been reading - and was once read and cherished quite long ago.

Miss Eileen Fealy drew several pictures in the book, as well - mostly faces and doodles.. she kept dates (her Christmas vacation dates, and a running 'x' off of the days she was in class?)  I wonder if she was the teacher or more likely, a student?  Sadly, I found nothing that could pinpoint who she was... but several other names did come up, during a very short span of years, at the Wittenberg University in Springfield, Ohio - during the graduation years of 1938 to 1941.  The book is dated 1936, and was published in 1934.   It satisfies my curiosity enough to find five signature names in the same college.. that it was probably used there.

For the record, in case anyone finds this and recognizes any of the names in the future - here are the names I can actually read in the book.  There are about thirty-eight signatures in total - but some of them are too hard to read or have been smeared in the back cover.  There are only a few signatures in the back - so I only photographed the front page.  Several of the signatures also have 'nicknames' in them, adding to the charm of the memory.

Eileen Fealy (or Fialy?)
Virginia Lee Kite ?
Oliver Clarke (in yearbook)
Roger Borohers ? "Butch"
Georgianna Cotter
Jeanne Todd
Geneva Davis "Nevie"
FH McNutt "Squirt" - this name shows up in the online yearbooks as Franklin Holbrook McNutt and FH Mc Nutt interchangeably
Reda Lapinsky (a name I found on the honor roll in 1934 and led me to the yearbooks)
Carl DeWitt "Moocher"
Muriel Jaffa
Janice Gold
Philip Goldberg
Betty Baldwin
Bettee Hornar ? Bettee Horner?
Emily Clarke (in yearbook)
Martha Corry
Jeanne Todd
Myra Click
Elizabeth Click "boots" "jooty" ?
Jeanne "Jinks" Johnson
Anna (R, reed, or ruth, or ?) O'Connor
Martha Compton (in yearbook)
Corra Mae Brooks
Abbie Whitaker
O H B "Oh He's a Bum' (funny)
Isabel Sheperd 'Izzie' (also in the yearbooks)
Betty Rowe
Don Williamson
Mary Louise Lyman
Helen Kohl
Jeanne Lawrence?
Carol Fenton (in yearbook)
Doris Thomas
Billy Morris "alias Willie"
Eunice Bryant
W H Hughes
and three or four more I really can't make a good try at -- maybe Richard Smith, Nancy Tulless? Lorna Fatherty? Saint Broca? 

If anyone has any more information - correction on possible translations of names.. I would love to find out more.  Maybe this will just by some miracle make its way to someone who was in this class that might still be alive - or their son or daughter, and they will get to see the signature.  (I am keeping the book, but publishing this because it is an awesome piece of history and someone else might enjoy it)

Astounding Science Fiction Collection

This is Mark's collection of Astounding science fiction magazines, later known as the SF magazine Analog, which is still in publication today. He has magazines from as early as 1939 in this collection, many of them full years, right up until the 1990s. We moved and reorganized these magazines during the last week - putting some duplicates and oddballs up on Ebay at our store.

The Analog magazine published early stories and serials by well-known SF authors such as Theodore Sturgeon, Philip K. Dick, Harry Harrison, Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Larry Niven, Robert Silverberg, Poul Anderson - and many more. There were also countless authors that never made it to the level of 'household names' as some of those just mentioned - but are also part of the history of early science fiction. I liked Mark's quote that these short stories are similar to a 'short course in the golden age of Science Fiction.' The magazine also did (and still does) publish fact science and technology articles.

More on the Astounding/Analog magazine publication from Wikipedia.


Close-up - they aren't in perfect condition but each copy is readable.


An old ad inside the cover of one that caught my interest. The year was 1939.


Another old ad from the back of a 1941 copy

Flea Market finds (and some knitting does occurr)

We found a steal at the flea market - an antique Singer sewing machine for such a small price, we had to scoop it up. It seems to work, too! The one thing we are having difficulty with is winding a new bobbin -- the instructions are wadded up and falling apart -- and this bobbin winder seems different than many of the ones we are looking at on the Internet. It is a 27-4 Singer according to the manual. We looked up the serial number (beginning with 'B') on the Singer website and it says this particular machine was made in 1904. However, since it has been refurbished, it might contain parts of several different models -- we're just not sure.


I play with the bobbin winder some.

A close-up of the winder in question.


There were also very good-smelling strawberries at the flea market!


Some knitting does still occurr here...
A *secret mystery project* (No guessing!) started out of fine white wool.

article on indian corn