Depressing scavenger hunt

This year was a difficult holiday.  My grandfather was in the hospital on Christmas, and he was very weak after coming home.  My family was there for the weekend after Christmas, and my father spent most of the time helping my grandfather with his mobility issues and doing the things my grandfather used to do (making the coffee, getting the mail, etc).

I was staying in the house.  The house now smells weird.  Other family members have been helping clean the house and move things out of the house, but the house still smells weird and is full of junk.  I went over with Kristen to get ready for a Salvation Army run and see if there was anything I wanted.  I moped my way through the costume jewelry and took a tile I'd ordered during a trip to Solvang, CA.  Still in its plastic even though I was toodling around California a decade ago (and the bummer continues!).  In my grandparents' defense, the tile is of a family crest, and family crests for people whose surname used to change once a generation are probably bullshit.  Oh, and they still have a house full of stuff.

Kristen asked if the few pins, tile, and felt bat magnet were all I wanted.  And then she mocked me for rescuing one of the fish pans from the Salvation Army pile. We shall see who has the last laugh when I make some gross gelatin dessert with my fish pan and she can't have any!

For most of the clean up effort I've felt that I would never find anything in their house that would give me as much joy as the time I discovered my cousins' abandoned My Little Ponies.  This feeling did not take into account staying in the house alone with no TV and no internet.

I found some postcards my great-great aunt and great-grandparents had received just in a box on an old writing desk.  I don't know if they'd been there when I'd look through stuff as a kid or if I just didn't give a shit about postcards from 1923 when I was 10.  They've been rescued along with a picture of my grandmother and a button pin from General Motors' 1940 World's Fair exhibit.

By the time I got to the drawer of patterns, I was in full scavenge mode.  I ended up grabbing pattern books for things I can't even do.  I figured we could all have a good laugh at men's knits on the internet, and then I'd list them on eBay.

I've added the crotch glow, but I want you to know that at least half of these pictures feature a man casually posing with a pipe.

Unfortunately there are no instructions for how to find an elephant belt.

This would be a good investment for the modern hipster.  Seriously, hipsters, who would think of bringing this look back?  This would be the least mainstream thing you could possibly wear.

I like that nearly all of these models (including the dog) feel slightly embarrassed to be wearing these things.  I guess the dog coat isn't as bad as the little shoes.

According to this, knitting is pretty much like calling somebody up.  Or texting for you 21st century Almost Teens.  Except you guys can just buy cheap clothes for less than it would cost to buy enough yarn for some of these projects lol.

What the Hell is Needle Tatting?

Got The Forgotten Crafts out of the library.  It's interesting, but it's much more "here's some shit you would've been expected to know how to do" than "here's how you do it."  I still don't really know what tatting is, but now I know that you need a shuttle and some thread, and it's "much as a spider spins a web behind her as she goes."

My interest in tatting is based on the fact that Ben Franklin (and I think Hobby Lobby too) have a kit on needle tatting which is the only place I ever see the damn thing referenced.  Knitters and crocheters are easy to find.  Outside of family members I don't think I've encountered another cross stitcher in real life, but I can find them on the internet.  I've at least seen crewel and candlewicking and other obscure needlecraft that nobody other than my mother wants to do.  But needle tatting?  Other than two paragraphs in The Forgotten Arts and Crafts and that kit at Ben Franklin, needle tatting does not exist.  Sometimes I think I want to learn it just so I can make my own needle tatting book and/or kit.  Working title: What the Hell is Needle Tatting?

Despite being written in the 1980's, The Forgotten Arts and Crafts still manages to long for a time when people knew their place and you could refer to people as "peasants".  Such as the peasants who enjoyed the useless, decorative results of tatting.  Ahh, for those halcyon days when the lower classes could be contented with a tatted collar and embroidery had yet to be ruined by the Victorians:

"As the nineteeth century wore on so taste declined (according to my taste at least) and embroidery reached perhaps its pit in Berlin wool-work....

On second thoughts, perhaps this was not the bottom of the pit.  Perhaps that has been reached today, when ready-to-embroider canvases are sold in shopping malls.  Clumsy representations of the paintings of old masters are already painted on them and the colored wool to create the picture is supplied with it.  This is not what the high art of embroidery is all about."

I'm trying to decide what exactly sullies the good name of high embroidery.  The ugly pattern?  The fact that it comes with the materials?  The male author manages to separate knitting, crochet, lace making, and tatting, but there is only a section on "embroidery."  Based on the description I assume he's complaining about needlepoint kits.  Needlepoint (like cross stitch) is technically a type of embroidery, but no gentlewoman would ever refer to it as such.  To appear suitably educated, a lady must remember that embroidery primarily refers to a trasnfered or drawn design covered over or filled in with a variety of stitches.  Such as this.