Fiacré's spade: The Cat's Pajamas

It was a brisk 13°F this morning, but Terry was quick to point out that it was 30° warmer than yesterday morning when it was (in case you are math-challenged) 17° below zero. January temperatures on the last day of February, for cripe’s sake, and Saturday is my day to take care of the chickens. I got through those chores in record time, you betcha.

Oh, the things I do to cheer myself up in winter! I’ve taken to putting smiley faces on my morning hard-boiled egg with Sriracha sauce.

Have a nice day!

It was creeping up above zero by the time I was ready to head down to Elgin. It was a bright, sunny day. Jane and I went to Sycamore first to pay our respects at the visitation for a friend’s mother. Julie is an old buddy from our camp days. We don’t see her often because she lives in central Wisconsin. It was good to chat with her and her husband for a few minutes, see the grown-up version of their two sons (who had no recollection of meeting us when they were babies), and meet the daughter-in-law and the first addition of the next generation.

We went back to Jane’s for lunch and then headed out for our fun activity of the day, the Cat’s Pajamas Production’s Chicagoland Vintage Clothing, Jewelry and Textile Show & Sale. Jane wanted to find some local contacts for unloading some of the better stuff from her mom’s house, such as hats, coats with fur collars, and literally boxes of costume jewelry. I went along so I could blog about something more interesting than last week’s blog, and you know how low that threshold is.

The show was in the Hemmens Building in downtown Elgin. This in itself was reason enough for me to tag along. Jane and I spent many, many hours, year after year at the Hemmens while I was in graduate school. It was the place that Girl Scouts Sybaquay Council hosted Sybaquay Way every March to celebrate the first Girl Scout meeting in 1912. Jane reminisced about roasting (if stationed near the windows upstairs) or freezing (if working in the basement) all day long. I always like volunteering for the event because I was usually put in charge of collecting money from all the places that were selling things and stashing it in a safe place. It was the only time during grad school when I could actually touch hundreds of dollars in cash, and I sorely missed the feel and smell of money. I remember at least one occasion when Jane rolled a cart loaded with cases of soda over her toe. Good times, good times.

The entrance to the Hemmens on a cold February afternoon

We paid our admission upstairs and got our hands stamped with a cat-like image. I couldn’t detect any pajamas. We also got a list of all the vendors, their home location, and their phone numbers.

Cat hand stamp--do you see pajamas?

We hadn’t gone far before we found a costume jewelry vendor. Jane told the woman about her mom’s collection. It turned out she was from Geneva, not too far away. She gave Jane a card and encouraged her to come by with the goods.

The next booth had a box of sewing patterns on sale for $5 a pop. “Remember all those patterns we threw out?” Jane asked wistfully.

“I remember.”

“Really, we should have gone to this last year before we started cleaning out the house,” Jane continued. “We would have known what to save.”

I gave her a withering glance. She obviously had forgotten the frantic days of throwing things in boxes or in the dumpster as we got the house ready to be put on the market. If we’d tried to sort through everything any more than we did, we’d still be at it.

We went downstairs where most of the vendors were. Coats with fur collars were going for $30 to $150. Hats ranged from $15 to $35. There were dresses, trousers, jackets, shoes, accessories of all kinds, tatting and drawn-thread work (embroidery that makes a pattern in the fabric by stitching all around holes with the same color thread, typically white thread on white fabric). Jane stopped to talk to the vendor at the latter booth because her grandmother did a lot of drawn-thread work tablecloths. I remembered finding boxes of them, carefully wrapped in tissue paper. The woman was only interested in large items that were really old. Jane guessed that she’d seen her grandmother doing the work in the 50’s, which was too new. The woman kept drawing our attention to the weight of the tablecloths she had and the quality of the workmanship (I’m pretty sure it would be workwomanship). She seemed to be on an automatic sales pitch, like she couldn’t stop herself from trying to get us to buy something even though Jane had made it clear she was trying to get rid of stuff. The vendor was from Minnesota, but Jane could send her pictures, and she could tell if she was interested in anything Jane had. Jane got a card and an email address.

Accessories

Clothing

Ostrich plumes from a time when people could not even imagine a plastic Rubbermaid bin

I went through the vendor list circling anyone who was within an reasonable distance. We went to all the booths we could find and made notes of the kinds of merchandise each was selling. The booth numbers were taped to the floor but were only loosely arranged in numeric order. The higher numbers were upstairs. The booths downstairs were missing many of the lower numbers. It went something like 1, 4, 11, 12, 13, 14, 25, 26. The numbers above 30 were in better order. We never did find booth 15. It could have been that they didn’t show.

When we were done downstairs, we finished the other half of the upstairs. One booth had a number of red sweaters and sweatshirts of obvious age sporting hand-stitched felt letters spelling “more ketchup please.” What was that about?

Someone put a lot of time in on these sweaters.

It did not surprise me that there was not much vintage clothing in the XXXL size. The people who came in vintage outfits were generally no larger than L, although some of the men may have been XL. I often found it hard to believe that anyone had ever been thin enough to fit in some of the clothes we saw. I have this same thought whenever I see Civil War uniforms. Those were some tiny soldiers.