Traditions and Vintage Patterns

Every 4th. of July there is a big flea market in the little town I’m from and it is my yearly tradition to go. This year we made the drive (about 1 1/2 hours), but it had rained all night and continued to rain all day and most of the vendors were already gone or packed up. We were so disappointed, luckily we were able to shop at the local antique mall (Nebraska translation – junk store). There were a lot of wonderful treasures and I hit the mother load of vintage patterns, the whole stack was bound together with a paper that said $1.00 for all.Here are the token ugly patterns from the 1980’s, maybe they’ll be stylish again in 10 or 20 years. I think these are from the 80’s as well, the one on the left is postmarked 1980. I can’t read the other one, but it is cute, I like the neckline detail. Some fun dresses and pant suits from the 1970’s, these are all really similar in design. The two simplicity patterns are Look Slimmer patterns, whatever that means. More fun 70’s dresses and culottes (is that really how you spell that?, it looks weird). In the very center of the stack DRESS PATTERNS FROM THE 1950’S!!!!! I about wet my pants when I saw these. The most exciting thing about all these patterns is they are my size (or darn close), can you believe it? I see vintage patterns fairly often and they are normally tiny, but these aren’t, they’re all around a size 20 or 22 AND THEY ONLY COST ME A DOLLAR!!!! can you tell I’m excited? Some of them are cut, but they are single sized patterns, not multi, like the modern ones and all of the instruction sheets seem to be intact. I am going to have to give some of these a try.

I found a lot of other great treasures that I’ll share in the future, they are waiting to be fixed, altered, and painted. Even Mr. Crafterella found something exciting for his collections (a vintage gas mask). It was a great day for shopping, even though the traditional 4th. of July flea market rained out. What are your 4th. of July traditions?