Vintage girl's pattern - blue coat - lining!

I got a request for the lining, so thought I'd get this up.  My mom got all the fabric, lining & buttons on the army base when she lived in Germany.

Here's the post where I talk about the coat & you'll see some old photos there.

And here's the post where you can see the pattern that my mom used.

Thanks for looking!

Vintage Pattern - Girlswear

You've seen the photo of me in my little blue coat (and seen the coat by itself--it's one of the many items of children's clothing in our bedroom).  Well, here's the pattern.  Looking thru the vintage patterns I have from my mom, I came across this & thought you might enjoy seeing it.  

It's Simplicity 2336 & is from the early 1960s.  

Hopefully my mom will comment to let us know where she got it (Germany or the US?).  If it was Germany I'm sure it was on the army base; apparently it was easy to get items from the US on army bases (maybe it still is?).  

Children's clothing - from the US, or Germany...

I believe I mentioned that the Roommate & I collect children's clothing (women's, too) because it tends to be more traditional in terms of style & decoration (and certainly in terms of care). So often in places like SE Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, the men are wearing pants and t-shirts (which makes sense--these people work hard--why wear your fancy stuff to do manual labor?). But the women & especially the children often are wearing the traditional decorated handcrafted masterpieces. So today, I'm proud to show you something from our collection...that was mine! My mom made this for me!

So there I am, with my mom, in Germany in 1963.  And NO, my mom does not still have that coat!  She made it, too, and over the years many people have offered to buy it; mods are especially interested in it!

It hangs on our bedroom wall now (along with many other items from the collection that you've seen already).  One thing we're always on the lookout for is old hangers; wooden or plastic, especially smaller, children's-sized hangers.

My mom is an expert seamstress (though she doesn't sew much anymore) & you can see her hard work on these detail photos.  I especially love the lining!

Boy's caftan from Turkey

This is a small caftan which we've had hanging on the wall in our hallway.  We have hangers up all over the place with clothing on them.  Possibly a weird way to decorate, but how else will we enjoy our treasures? It's woven silk, with this amazing printed cotton lining, and lots of embroidery on the edges.  A friend borrowed it once for a Hallowe'en party; she was quite small, so it fit her beautifully.

We bought it in Nevşehir, in the Cappadocia region of Turkey.  We also bought 3 boys' hats there...but those are in storage somewhere.  I promise, after we move next week I'll get them all out for show. This page is quite a good reference if you'd like to learn more about Turkey...

One thing that's interesting about the design is that the pieces of silk are all rectangles, but to make gussets & darts, (the places where humans bend & change size), they've created those with pieces of velvet & silk, in contrasting colors.  The two top pictures show this design element pretty well, I think.

I hope you like seeing these items.  If you have any questions, let me know; we've learned a lot about textiles, weaving, embroidery, etc. as part of this hobby, and if I don't know the answer, I'm a librarian, so I can point you in the right direction...

Thanks for your interest!

From the Collection - Child's top from northern Thailand

We bought this in Mae Hong Son, up in the Golden Triangle part of Thailand (near the Chinese & Burmese borders).  I'm not sure, but I think it's from the Lisu Hill Tribe, mostly because of the style of embroidery.  It's a great example of the care & expertise that goes into children's clothing.  Another thing, which you can't tell, is that the silver beads have little stones (or something) in them, so they make noise when the child is running.  Much less irritating than those children's sneakers that flash or beep each time a little boy or girl takes a step in the western world!  

From the Collection - Children's clothing from Oman

We've collected a lot of children's clothing (though we don't have children!) in our travels.  Why?  Well, this is what I think...20-30-40-50 years ago, the world must have been even more amazing than it is now:   Dutch people walking around in wooden shoes, Indonesian women in dresses made of birch bark, heavily embroidered aprons in Central Europe, woven Kente and raffia cloth in Africa, felted wool caps in Ladakh, and sealskin outfits that kept you warm but let you sweat in the northern latitudes.  Wow.  The world is still pretty amazing, but clothing is not why you go traveling anymore.  Unfortunately, in most places, traditional clothing is something you wear for a festival, a graduation ceremony, a wedding, and most other days you wear pants and a shirt or t-shirt.  (This isn't completely true; here's a brief list of great places where you can still see people going about their lives in the clothing that they've been wearing for the last 200-1,000 years:  Guatemala and southern Mexico, Indonesia, Ladakh, Bolivia and especially India and Japan.  The Persian/Arabian Gulf region is great, too, but traditional clothing is actually mandated by law in many of those countries.)  Something else we've noticed is that when traditional clothing is being worn, it's usually the women and children wearing it.  Men's couture seems to be the easiest to switch to pants and a t-shirt.  Also, children's and women's clothing is amazing because of the care and hard work that goes into decorating it.  And for us, travelling over the last 20 years, women's and children's clothing is really all that's left in antique stores.  The care, hard work and design that go into creating and decorating children's clothing also indicate how much the child was loved.  My guess is that the women doing this work had plenty of other things to do, but they spent a lot of time on these clothes anyway.

So here are a few items from the Sultanate of Oman.  There's a good clothing article with lots more photos here.  And a more authoritative article here (from the government).  The little boy's dishdashah (above) is worn all over Oman, and you see them mostly in white, though sometimes in other pastel colors.  This little girl's thawb (left), is typical of little girls all over Oman, but for adult women it's more typical of central Oman.  It would be worn with loose pants, called al basta. The embroidery on this has been done with a sewing machine.  Not that it looks any easier than doing it by hand--I've got some great examples of extremely intricate machine-stitched embroidery I'll share later.

It dawned on my this morning that you might like to see real children in these clothes.  Fortunately we took a digital camera with us when we went to Oman in 1998 and those photos are fairly easy to sort through (once I'd gone downstairs and dug out the backup hard drive).  First of all, a photo of some children in an oasis near al-Mudhaibi, which is near our favorite souq, Sinaw. The kids were overjoyed because after walking around the oasis for a while we returned to find a goat on the hood of our car!  (Goats will find any method available to get up into the trees for a good meal of leaves.)  I think this photos illustrates my earlier point: most of the boys are wearing western clothing (the only boy in a dishdashah and kuma--Omani embroidered cap--is hidden by the others)...while the girls are dressed traditionally.

But of course we have plenty of photos, so here's a nice one of a boy in a dishdashah and misr, and very cool sunglasses, taken in Sinaw.  The woman behind him is in traditional Bedu dress-up clothes.  The Bedu mostly live in the desert and only see their friends when they come to the souq (which is held weekly), so it's definitely a dress-up day.

Of course it's impossible for me to write a post about souqs in Oman without including a photo of a camel.  And this is my favorite type of camel photo--a camel in the back of a small pickup!  We saw these all over Oman (once we got out of the capitol) and I loved it; what a reminder that you're not in Kansas anymore, huh?!