KDW

Aunt Virginia taught us to make these gift tags when we were little.  I still make them.  She used pinking shears to make a decorative edge all around, but these days I have all sorts of crafty scissors.  It’s one way to recycle old Christmas cards and ribbons, and we were doing it way before it became trendy to recycle!

Candles, perhaps even more than macrame, were the craft item that epitomized the early 1970s. They came in all shapes, sizes, textures, colors and scents. My cousin Joan converted a room in the family cellar into a candle-making workshop, and I remember pouring wet sand into a bucket to make a mold for a sand candle like the tripod one on the lower left of the picture. And of course you could order kits.

(Notice the mushroom-shaped order form.)

Inspired by my older cousin, my crowning masterpiece as a junior candle artisan was an olive-green smiley face candle scented like peanut butter, which I impulsively and impressively gifted to my dad’s cousin’s family one Christmas. I’m sure it was a true WTF moment for them, though they reacted graciously. But then the wick is lit, and the candle deteriorates within minutes into a Boris Karloff  caricature…  how fleeting is the gift. For years, even decades, after the era you could see unburnt candles for sale, dusty and faded, at flea markets and thrift stores.

But the malleability of wax proved greater than its shortcomings. This candle is sculpted and layered into something like a Roger Dean landscape for a Yes album cover.

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Artisans seemed to vie with each other to create more unique and complicated forms. This candle actually uses a translucent shell which is created by pouring hot wax in a water-filled pan and then rolling it around a cylinder for a barnacle-like effect.

Stranger still were chunk candles, wax odds and ends which were put into the mold with hot wax  poured around them…made in a food can, with the right colors and shapes, the candle could look eerily like a DelMonte fruit salad (which sadly I spent three or four of my hard-earned dollars on at a church bazaar.) At the end of the seventies the candle craze ended also, the upscale taste of the decades since favoring tapers and tea lights.

But you still can buy waxy food! Without the wicks in them though.

Eschewing the work boots and belted tunics of days gone by, today’s gnomes bristle with attitude and the urban rhythms of the street. Don’t mess with these guys. They will run you over with a skateboard and spray paint your flowerpots.

Granny Square mania struck in the late 1960s and ruled through the 1970s. Afghans, vests, skirts, shawls — usually black backgrounds with multicolored yarms, to use up odds and ends from larger crochet projects. This is a rug.

Plain hats made a good canvas for pompoms and other trims. I like the berry bowl straw hat at right center. I totally would have worn it at age 13.

Snoopy goes up, up, and away with string art wound on nails to form a hot air balloon, cheesily displayed by a model in dire need of a hot oil treatment for her hair. But wait! Isn’t he supposed to be piloting a Sopwith Camel?

These dolls graced a thousand flea markets and church bazaars. The doll on the right looks like an alien about to perform an abduction of some poor sleeping innocent.

I’m the luckiest little girl in the world to have a yarn doll this big!

More surprises!

I think some people went just too far with the saving and recycling.

As pink, black, and grey were the colors of the 1950s, the early 1970s belonged to traffic light red, green, and yellow.

Poor Mrs. Hassenpfeffer! She was too butterfingered with crafts, couldn’t sew or embroider, and found knitting and crocheting too complicated. But there was  Artex.

Artex was sold like Tupperware by hostesses giving house parties, and distributed with catalogs like the one above. It was a sort of pen attached to a tube of paint the user squeezed onto stamped pieces of fabric, the colors delineated by a diagram (this one is for an Artex Last Supper)

Even for the early 70s the designs were hopelessly dated, with Flintstone and Ralph Kramden stereotypes (note how the housewife is General Manager of the house while her husband is a General Nuisance with an iron cord wrapped around his leg and a dripping baby potty seat in one hand), racial stereotypes mixed with Christian prayers, and lowbrow humor.

Shaggy pillows were in back then. The shaggier, the better, especially if they came in a swirly psychedelic motif, the influences of the 1960s lingering on like a bad LSD trip in a Doppler shift.

Ditto for the hand-hooked throw rug. Which to me looks like something in a petri dish.

And what do you use for these creations? Jonathan Linvingston Seagull yarn of course!

Aunt Jane’s wig makes a surprise appearance at my Dad’s birthday party! Wearing a pale blue floppy-brimmed sunhat no less.

This is  T-shirt with a picture of a dragon on it.  I am in the process of coloring the dragon with embroidery.  I’ve been working on it for over a year now.  I don’t get to it very often, and I’ve still got a long way to go…

Who is this pleasant-looking bearded young man? He was on a series of slides dating from May 1971. I don’t remember him as a family friend. He might be a co-worker of my dad’s, but seems too young and too hip to be working at the Jet Lab, which employed a lot of veterans and buzzcut pen-protector types. He might be a teacher. The background is unfamiliar. Any guesses?

In the early 70s there was a mania to stick sewing trim on anything that needed the perk-up of a little texture and color. My cousin Barbara made liberal use of braids, pompoms and rickrack, and I followed her example in decorating plain terra cotta flowerpots and selling them at flea markets.

Wright’s was the chief supplier of trim, and they marketed many ways to use it including these tshirt designs. The dangling fish belt of the girl on the far right (who bears an uncanny resemblance to actress Jodi Foster) is unusual. But it’s the girl on the far left who embodies “the look” we aspired to in the mid 70s.

Of all the fashion mistakes of the 1970s, surely none was as poorly named as the Dickie. I don’t know of anyone who  fessed up to wearing one of these or was fooled by one of them.

Maxiskirts decorated with crazy daisies and rickrack.

A model poses, legs akimbo. When I drew my childhood fashions, the girls (human or dragon) would always take poses like this, because when my mom and I went shopping we would always spend hours in the fabric section pouring over the pattern catalogs.