Whitney Made valentines are those sweet little ones that are printed on a slick lighter weight paper, embossed and gilded. They often have line drawings inside and the poems are so fun.
The majority of the ones I've been finding have been from the 1920s and 1930s, but the George Whitney Company was founded in Worcester, MA in the 1870s.
He developed the machinery for the embossing and paper lace cutting. Prior to this time all these materials were imported from Europe.
Another name that shows up is Carrington out of Chicago, but I'm having a harder time finding info about them. I even have a few cards that have both Whitney Made and Carrington printed on the back so I'm assuming there was a buy out or merger somewhere along the line.
The inks used in these cards is still very bright and true and the paper used were obviously very low acid content, for them to have held up so well.
i found this info last spring and filed it for future reference. it comes from http://ruffledblog.com. heather used vintage postcards for her save the date cards for her wedding, but i think they'd be neat for lots of different party invites.
the process is for removing ball point pen (and that's another blog), so most probably cards for the late 40's and newer.
if you actually want to mail the cards, you will need to steam off the old stamps first. then:
"...to remove ballpoint pen ink: put on rubber gloves, get out bleach, q-tips, and a paper towel which has been run under water and then rung out so that it is slightly damp. Dip one q-tip in bleach and run the q-tip along each line of text. The ink should start to disappear. After bleaching a few rows of text, wipe the postcard clean with the damp paper towel. Continue this process until the ink is gone. It may take a few swipes, and some ink may not come off at all. The postmark will not be removed.."
although most of the really old postcards tell a story all their own, there are a great many "wish you were here" type cards out there with no significant value. i think it could be fun just to recycle and resend some of these old cards.
uncovered a book when i was pickin couple of weeks ago that i thought was cool. found it again last night when i was moving some books and googled it. found 3 copies priced between $150 and $500. yikes! what to do? list it, or hoard it?
list on etsy or go to eBay with it? seems like the wrong time so close to christmas. i may just have to fondle and hoard for a while.
from the looks of the estate sale listings it looks like pickin is going to be slim for the next few weeks. only a few things posted for january. do all the regular companies head for warmer climes in january? what are helen and karen and i going to do?
well, i'm off the pack last minute orders, and then see what kind of trouble i can get into. i could wrap packages....
Vintage patterns appeal on so many levels. First the chance to recreate an old style, maybe something you remember your mom or grandmother wearing, or you just like dressing in the retro styles. Maybe you are just a collector loving the vintage art work. Or maybe you are a collage artist or scrapbooker who loves adding bits and pieces of the past to your work.
In any event, over the last months I've followed some wonderful google trails and learned a great deal about commercial sewing patterns.
Patterns for the home sewer first appeared on the market in the 1860s. Most women took apart old, worn out clothes to use as a pattern for a garment. With the birth of sized patterns sewing clothes, which all but the rich did, became much easier.
The birth of Butterick Patterns, thought to be the first, was inspired by the wife of Ebenezer Butterick, who commented to her tailor husband that it would be so much faster to make a garment if she had a sized pattern to follow. He began to experiment and his first patterns were made from cardboard, but they were bulky and hard to ship, and he settled on tissue paper that was easy to fold and ship anywhere.
Directions and cutting patterns did not begin to appear until the 1920s. Up until that point, it was assumed that all women knew how to sew and just having a sized pattern to follow speeded up the process.
the papertalescass blog is a thing of the past, but http://www.papertales.etsy.com/ lives on and i've decided i'd like to document the adventures of professional pickin. the sub title will be adventures with karen. karen being the australian voice of my gps.
my purpose here is twofold. just to document what i find and where (cause my brain doesn't retain much for very long) and also to share what i learn on this journey acquiring old stuff.
today is a good example. i was going through some old cookbooks that i picked up a while back and started reading Baker's Favorite Chocolate Recipes A Handbook of Chocolate Cookery copyright 1952 Fifth Edition. on page 7 this line popped out at me: "It's not just an accident that Baker's Chocolate has won and held friends for over 175 years." WHAT?
wait a minute...175 years old in 1952? that means the company started in 1760 something?????? so off to google i went, and sure enough baker's choclate started as a partnership is 1765, but the thing that really gave the company a boost was the Boston Tea Party when patriots began drinking chocolate instead of tea.
another neat bit of info was that Abraham Lincoln had a grocery store in New Salem, IL in 1833 and researchers found that the only packaged and advertised food product sold in the store was Baker's Breakfast Cocoa. more info at http://brands.kraftfoods.com/BakersChocolate/heritage.htm
i know that i've picked up a couple of Baker's cookbooks over the last year, but this one is going to hang out with me for a while :D
so i'm off to other chores now. have a good one.
