Today's World & Downward Quality

I was browsing Etsy today & noticed the vast difference in crochet patterns back in the 1930s-1940s vs. 1980s-now; crocheted blouses in the 30s & 40s did not have holes in them, as crochet has become known today for those holes. 
        This same trend towards less sophisticated work, designs, & the efforts put in to make things by hand is not isolated to crocheting alone.                              
        I look at vintage hats on eBay, & I have noticed that hats made in the 1930s, 1940s, & the 1950s were all well made-they exist today, most of them in excellent & wearable condition. Hats made in the 1960s began to shrink-well they grew smaller in the 1950s because short hairstyles were "in" so the hats were adjusted in proportion. By the mid 1960s alot of the hat was gone-it had shrunk to a single floral with veiling, held on by a comb; there were beehive hats & berets, but only the beret has survived all decades.
        The 1970s saw hats that were without decoration, a downgrade in quality, effort, & artistry from the 1940s-which was for half that decade at war.
        
         Quilts are another example, I've seen quilts at a museum that were made when the lighting was supplied by whale oil-these quilts had LOTS of intricate, closely spaced quilting. This was at a time when women had to boil water by wood-fires & use lye & other difficult & physically demanding steps merely to do laundry.     
          The 1930s quilts, with electric lighting, were still quilted, but less meticulously, with the stitches further apart. This was when sewing machines were around & washing machines.
          
           I hear all the time about how today's culture is bad, etc. They haven't looked at what I've been studying, & I think there is an underlying cause to all of this general decline.
           You can partly blame corporate culture, with their single purpose of pursuing money-cutting corners, cheapening the quality of their goods while chasing ever higher money/profits. Yet why was it that people were investing less of their time in what they made themselves? The early quilts were in a time before radio, but you don't use your eyes for it-so why the degeneration of quality in quilting techniques? The same with crochet, in the 1930s & 40s the patterns for nearly every item-whether hats, doilies, gloves, blouses-it was all for the more experienced crocheter. Today we have no shortage of crocheters, take a look at Craftster, but the doilies today are made in bedspread weight thread-not in size 20 or 30, like back in the 1930s. Today we have lots of other hobbies, all competing for our attention, but they had to churn butter by hand in the 19th century, had to make most of their clothes by hand-unless they could afford to have someone else sew their clothes.

Vintage Compacts

So here are 5 pics of a compact that has a small comb, a tube of lipstick-still has some of the original-a powder compartment, & the mirror flips down so you can store money, id, etc. behind it. It has its' original black carrying case, which is a stiff, black, moire-type material. That material resembles the lining in many vintage purses except for the color, most of the vintage bags I have are lined in cream or champagne colored fabric. I did buy this compact on ebay, a vintage shop has one for several hundred dollars, this one was only close to $100.

Ruby's Hats

These hats I made, the grey and blue ones I made entirely, cut the brim from a stiff polyester craft felt bought at Joann's. The blue hat has a crocheted crown, the brim is covered with taffeta(manmade). The grey hat I used that wonderfully soft polyester micro-suede, I lined the inside with lavender scrap cotton left over from another project. Both the blue and grey hats are too big for the mannequin head, I have a fat head, I can't fix that, so....

The green hat has a frame I bought here;
they have awesome 'raw frames'. I also used some Vogue patterns, but as usual I made several changes. I noticed that "summer" hats are either wide-brimmed or veiled & small. I bought veiling from here.
Also vintage veiling from here
The above has vintage forget-me-nots, in velvet and paper, there are many flowers with labels that say: Made in West Germany, Made in France, etc. I put forget-me-nots on the green hat above, the lily is new from Joann's. What looks to me like rosebuds can be found in many shops that sell vintage trims, sometimes these are called 'cactus buds'. They are made of a vintage plastic and are flocked to varying degrees with green, little 'slits' are cut out and rose-ish pinkish color can be seen.

The veiling I pin on while wearing the hat, difficult but to have the veiling cocoon around the face how I like means having to shift it around and use clothespins, then sewing the veiling on by hand. It helped having actual vintage hats to study, and some of those had veiling only past the eyes, some looked like the veiling was permanently folded back over the hat, like lace.