Past Junkin'

Some of my favorite junkin' finds from years past. Vintage Ice Capades booklets!

Some vintage cookie cutters still in the package.

I love this old vintage lunch box! I keep all my favorite recipes tucked inside.

Vintage Skates and a Powder Tin

Damp, cold, windy, March weather sure can put a damper on treasure hunting. But there is still hope in hidden treasures tucked away. A couple of items from my forgotten collection of Ice Skating stuff turned up after an afternoon of some much needed spring cleaning. Today I discovered two pair of dusty, dirty, pairs of ice skates and a vintage Avon Perfumed Talc Tin. Memory fails me as to where I bought the skates, but an old friend gave me the Avon Tin 8-10 years ago.

Farm Life & Feed Sacks

Ginny Helphinstine Reeves grew up on a farm in rural Fleming County and has fond memories of her mother and grandmother putting feed sack material to good use. Ginny’s recollections of rural life bring back fond memories of her mother and her grandmothers cooking and sewing and how her family made “many a garment” with feed sack cloth. “In grade school about all I wore were feed sack dresses. Mother would save the material and send it to aunt Tootsie in Harlan, KY, she was an excellent seamstress, still is”, Ginny said. “If she had your measurements she didn’t need to see you, so even though she had a large family of her own she would make all these feed sack dresses for my sister Fran and I and send them to us by the time school started. So my sister and I had all these feed sack dresses for school. Everything was ironed back then. Even our dish towels were made from feed sacks. That’s the way it was for everyone in our community, we made do with what we had. I have dried many, many dishes with those feed sack towels”.

Collecting and trading different patterns of feed sack material was a favorite pastime for farm wives. “Sometimes daddy would go to the store without mother, and when he did she would bring out a piece of material for him to find a piece to match, if they didn’t have it you would find someone to trade with”, Ginny said. When Ginny was in the fourth grade she made her first apron. “My first sewing project for 4h-H was an apron made out of feed sack”, Ginny said. “I worked on it for a long time to get the stitches real small. Christine Hurst and Mamie Morrison were 4-H leaders back then and came to the lunch room at Goddard school and helped us cut our patterns out. Miss Mamie would say” now Ginny you gotta make smaller stitches. It seemed like I worked on that apron forever, trying to get the stitches as small as possible. I still have that apron."

I really need to clean up my collection of blogs, so today I have decided to move some post from the blogs that never get updated. This one is from The Vintage Hen. When I was a little girl sometimes my siblings and I would spend the night at our mamaw Petitt's. Every morning at the crack of dawn mamaw would wake all six of us up for a hearty breakfast before she left for work as a janitor at the Bethel Elem. School. This is when I learned to love me some good hot coffee!! Before the sun even peaked through, mamaw donned her apron and was in her kitchen stirring up a batch of homemade biscuits. In the corner of that kitchen was an old stool that held this lard can full of flour, rolling pin, the biscuit cutter,(made from a tiny tin can)and a flour sifter. What I wouldn't give for one of those tiny fluffy biscuits today!! Below is all the original stuff from mamaws kitchen.