Old Craft Mags

I went to WA for a bit to visit my friends and got home last night. I meant to post while I was away, but I forgot that my wireless internet doesn’t work on campus. For those of you that are new here, I go to school at the University of Puget Sound normally, but I am studying abroad at Lancaster University this year. Anyways, when I went up to visit people, I was staying with my friend Sarah. Her mom sent me an awesome present inside of a care package to Sarah.

Old craft mags. Her mom found them and thought I might like them. I definitely like them. They’re from the late 70s and are pretty amusing. The recipes look super disgusting and the craft projects are so bizarre. They all seem to have instructions on how to make Nativity scenes from weird things like toilet paper rolls and corn husks as well as stranger art pieces made from weaving on an old branch. The magazines are definitely targeted at an older audience if the ads are anything to go off of. There are ads for denture creams, laxatives, adult diapers and other fun things of that sort.

The magazines have a surprising number of raglans and a not so surprising number of bad hair styles. I guess raglan patterns make sense because they don’t take up much space, but I kept looking at the simple striped raglans (of which there were many) and wondering why the editors thought that they needed to feature this pattern so many times. Did they think that their readers couldn’t figure out how to change the stripe sequences themselves?

In the crochet department, I was expecting things like the vest on the left, but I wasn’t expecting the sweater on the right. Attractive crocheted sweaters that aren’t lacey are such a rarity. I honestly never expected to see one in a craft mag like this one. I’m going to try to convince my mom to make it for herself. She keeps saying that she is going to crochet herself a sweater but never finds quite the right pattern.